An Inside Voice
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Josef Hoffmann radically reduced the entire history of decoration to its most simple, elemental form: The square. Predating the geometric neoplastic experiments of Mondrian by more than a decade, Hoffmann’s distillation of ornament was rooted in modernism’s rejection of historically based styles in favor of a new style that would more adequately express the character of the modern individual. This new style sought a unity of the arts –– based on the idea of gesamtkunstwerk –– and a harmony between objects and the space they inhabited. Perhaps for the first time, an object’s function was considered equal to or greater than its form. More important, objects no longer served to define the owner’s personality, but instead were meant to enhance and facilitate daily life.
Hoffmann’s reduction was not intended to merely sublimate ornament to the strict confines of function. He freed ornamentation from its historical constraints by simplifying forms to the level of sameness –– exploiting the universality of the square and the grid ––so they could precisely relate to other similarly decorated objects, broadcasting his concept of unified interior space. Obviously, the best way to understand Hoffmann’s formidable ideas of spatial relationship is to experience one of his interiors firsthand, and the Neue Galerie has now installed four of them in “Josef Hoffmann: Interiors, 1902–1913.”
Standing in these smartly reconstructed rooms it does all make sense. All of the rooms –– a girl’s bedroom from the Max Biach residence (Vienna 1902), a bedroom from the Hans Salzer residence (Vienna 1902), the dining room from the residence of Jerome Stonborough and Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein (Berlin 1905), and the dining room from the residence of Ferdinand Hodler (Geneva 1913) –– are furnished almost entirely with their original objects, except for the occasional textile or wall covering, an impressive feat by curator Christian Witt-Dörring. There are also preparatory drawings of designs, period photographs of each room, and a large display of other objects designed by Hoffmann, notably his glass and metalwork for the Wiener Werkstätte. Even the walls not used to delineate Hoffmann’s interiors are covered in his black-and-white patterns, enveloping the viewer in a riot of stripes and polka dots.
In the bedroom designed for Katharina Biach, Hoffmann orchestrated every detail like the painter who composes a canvas containing forms pitched against other forms to achieve pressures, weights, and movements. The stenciled pattern on the walls –– a snappy red-and-blue on white image resembling paired-down architecture ––mimics the four elongated lamps hanging from the ceiling. Hoffmann uses their relationship to pull the eye upward –– to experience the room’s verticality –– while simultaneously moving it out toward the wall –– to experience the room’s horizontality. The space of the room is mapped.
Also playing off this patterned wall in Katharina’s bedroom are the decoration and construction of the furniture pieces. The cabinets are constructed to act as a continuous, unified volume. Inset squares running along the base used for pulls and locks relate to small, similarly sized squares on the wall, causing the eye to bounce from wall to furniture and back. Combine this with the flattening effect created by painting the outer rims the same blue as the wall, and the cabinet’s entire volume is psychologically pushed back into the wall. Smaller events within each object are equally geared toward unifying space, for even the winking half-moon ornamentation on the cupboard’s façade is designed to blur and dissolve the solidity of its material. Hoffmann provides a type of spatial gestalt in which the individual objects, as beautiful as they might be, do not compete for attention but instead work together harmoniously.
This idea is experienced even more straightforwardly in Hoffmann’s design for the master bedroom in the Salzer apartment, executed in rich chocolates instead of his customary white palette. Here, everything is based entirely on symmetry, the grid and permutations of the square. It is a geometrically patterned carpet, and not a stenciled wall, that visually binds this room. Its uniformity gives the furniture the feeling of emerging out of –– or liquefying down into — a type of three-dimensional graph paper. The squares in the carpet become unbound, running along the walls, around the bed’s head- and footboards, up the curtains and down the drawers, circumnavigating the room, framing and defining space.
Hoffmann’s investigation into the slippery ambiguity of space led him to design more complex objects based on his atectonic formal language; these objects were constructed so they appeared to deny their actual physical materiality. This is particularly evident in Hoffmann’s furniture for the artist Ferdinand Hodler’s dining room. In fact, all the furniture in Hodler’s room is constructed to resemble stacked building blocks. Hoffmann is trying to further destabilize concrete spatial relationships by making each object feel like it could be easily knocked over with a light shove. Also, because of its graining and color contrast, the use of gorgeous, black-stained limed oak for each piece has the effect of removing any sense of weight from the wood.
The seat of the dining chair Hoffmann designed for Hodler looks like it has only been delicately placed on stocky legs, with no evident use of nails or glue; calligraphically drawn arms sit unbalanced on blocky stems. He chose an energized black and yellow upholstery by Dagobert Peche, called Schwalbenschwanz, which he then framed using a high contrast black-and-white braiding. This use of pattern –– both in the upholstery and in the wood grain ––provides a decorative flourish that softens the rigid, programmatic aspect to his design. It shows Hoffmann calibrating opposing design schemes to suggest the ability of space to be transitional and malleable. Because of Hoffmann, the interior was no longer a place to store things collected; it was a conduit used to express progressive ideas about how life should be lived in the modern age.
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