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Sitzmaschine Miniature

Josef Hoffmann

With the Miniature Collection, Vitra presents seating furniture classics in miniature format. Among them is the so-called Sitting Machine by the Austrian Josef Hoffmann. The architect and designer was born in 1870 and came from a wealthy, bourgeois home. After completing his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna with Joseph Maria Olbricht, Josef Hoffmann co-founded the Secession in Vienna in 1897. He is also responsible for one of the main structures of the Viennese Secessionist movement, the Stoclet Palais in Brussels, and the famous Villa Skywa Primavesi in Vienna. His chair, also known as chair No. 670, combines the expressiveness of Secessionism with the elegance of the bent wood and owes its name to the voluminous, geometrical body and movable backrest.


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5 New Architecture & Design Exhibitions for December 2021

...And during your visit please stay safe, stay responsible, and above all, stay curious…… "Josef Hoffmann: Progress Through Beauty" at the MAK – Museum für angewandte Kunst, Vienna, Austria Born on December 15th 1870 in the contemporary Brtnice, Czech Republic, Josef Hoffmann is and was without question one of the more important protagonists in the development of European architecture and design in the late 19th/early 20th centuries; and that not only on account of what he himself realised, important as that is, nor only through his teaching, important as that is, but also through his work in mediating, one could say popularising, the developing positions of the periods in which he was active... Promising a presentation of over 1,000 objects from across the genres in which Hoffmann was active, including architecture, interior design, product design and exhibition design, and featuring both well known projects and moments and also little known, and a great many previously unseen, projects and moments, Progress Through Beauty should provide not only for a fulsome Josef Hoffmann retrospective worthy of his contribution to developments in architecture and design, but for all allow for new insights into Hoffmann's oeuvre and contribution; should allow for differentiated approaches to Hoffmann's oeuvre and contribution, which should not only allow for a more complete understanding of Josef Hoffmann's relevance and legacy, but also allow for more complete understandings of the development(s) of architecture and design...

Wagner, Hoffmann, Loos and Viennese Modernist Furniture Design. Artists, Patrons, Producers @ The Hofmobiliendepot Vienna

...To mark the centenary, and help underscore the important role Vienna played at the turn of the 19th/20th century in the development of art, architecture, music and literature, museums across Vienna are staging a wide range of specially themed exhibitions throughout 2018; the Hofmobiliendepot - Imperial Furniture Museum - taking the opportunity to celebrate not only Otto Wagner, but his younger contemporaries Josef Hoffmann and Adolf Loos... Three of, arguably the three, leading protagonists of architecture and furniture design in the period of the Wiener Moderne were Otto Wagner, that Grand Doyen of Austrian architecture and urban planning, who's Postsparkasse building set new construction, material and aesthetic standards and who's bridges and stations for the Stadtbahn urban railway network continue to enrich the individual atmosphere of the Austrian capital; Josef Hoffmann, co-founder of the aforementioned Wiener Secession, co-founder of both the German and Austrian Werkbunds and co-founder of the Wiener Werkstätte via which art and craft were unified with the aim of creating aesthetically pleasing, practical goods for everyday use, and which today is for many the principle understanding of Wiener Moderne design; and Adolf Loos arguably best known as an author and critic, his polemic "Ornament and Crime" being one of the most widely, and most widely incorrectly, quoted design theory texts, but who with his office block for Goldman & Salatsch, a building without external window decoration, and that next to the ornately festooned Hofburg Palace, created not only a work truly revolutionary of its time, but a work that remains one of the most idiosyncratic and charming in Vienna...

5 New Design Exhibitions for December 2014

...Josef Hoffmann, Adolf Loos und die Folgen" at the MAK Vienna, Austria For reasons we've never quite understood, it is all too often forgotten that Austria, and for all Vienna, has been the centre of numerous cultural, architecture and design movements of the past century or two... Although the fame and glory was to be reserved for others, without the likes of Josef Hoffmann and Adolf Loos and the work they carried out in the late 18th/early 19th century, many of the later developments would almost certainly not have been possible in the form they ultimately were...


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