811 Chairs attributed to Josef Hoffmann for Thonet, 1940s, Set of 4

Architect-designer Josef Hoffmann was born in 1870 in Prinitz, Moravia (now Brtnice, the Czech Republic). He studied architecture at the Senior State Commercial and Technical School in Brünn (now Brno, Czech Republic). After a year of practice in Würzburg, Germany, he moved to Vienna, the city where he would remain for the rest of his life. He enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts there, and, between 1892 and 1895, studied under both Karl von Hasenauer and Otto Wagner. From 1896 to 1897, he worked in Wagner’s Vienna studio. He also became one of the founding members of the Vienna Secession, a group of artists (including Gustav Klimt, Carl Moll, and others) who favored a modern, experimental approach to the arts. Hoffman’s contributions to several Secession exhibition installations, all influenced by the Art Nouveau-Jugendstil style, helped establish his name. In 1899, he was appointed a professor at Vienna’s Kunstgewerbeschule, a position he held until his retirement in 1936. He taught in the school’s architecture, metalwork, enamel, and applied art departments.

Around 1900, Hoffmann became a proponent of the Gesamtkunstwerk (or total work of art) approach, exemplified through unified architecture and interior design, with an emphasis on craftsmanship. He was cofounder and co-artistic director, alongside Koloman Moser, for the new Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshops) beginning in 1903. In 1905, he left the Secession, and received the commission to design the Palais Stoclet in Brussels. Completed in 1911, the Stoclet was arguably Hoffmann’s most important architectural project.

Throughout his prolific 50-year career, Hoffmann designed everything from textiles to furniture, fashion, jewelry, exhibitions, and buildings for prestigious clients like Lobmeyr and Lötz. Later in his life, he focused primarily on housing projects. Aesthetically, his work evolved from Jugendstil to more minimal, geometric forms and then on toward neoclassicism.

He died in Vienna in 1956.

Thonet—the oldest surviving furniture company in the world—began its long life in 1819, when cabinetmaker Michael Thonet (1796-1871) established a furniture workshop in Boppard, Germany. A proponent of the Biedermeier style, he specialized in chairs, tables, and storage pieces characterized by clean lines, reduced ornamentation, and an emphasis on functionalist principles. By the 1830s, Thonet’s experiments in laminated and steam-bent wood furniture, like his famous Boppard Chair (1836), brought international acclaim. Thonet’s designs achieved a combination of lightness, durability, and comfort unknown in European furniture at the time.

A great fan of his work, Prince Metternich of Austria invited Thonet to present his designs to the Viennese court in 1842. Finding so much support there, Thonet opened a new company in Vienna in 1849. In 1853, he transferred his company to his sons, and Gebrüder Thonet was established.

Through the second half of the 19th century, Gebrüder Thonet designs grew increasingly popular with the cultural vanguard, especially among progressive design thinkers and tastemakers. One design in particular, the No. 14 Café Chair (ca. 1859), led the way to international success: the chair’s innovative bending technique was well suited to industrial production, and its rationalized, easily assembled structure allowed for efficient packing and shipping. In 1850, Anna Daum famously outfitted her fashionable Viennese café with No. 14 Chairs, and by the 1870s, Gebrüder Thonet had sales offices across Europe and the US. To date, more than 50 million No. 14 Chairs have been sold worldwide–not counting the untold pirated copies.

Iconic pieces from the traditional Gebrüder Thonet collection include Rocking Chair No. 1 (1860), No. 14 Café Chair (ca. 1859), Adolf Loos’s Café Museum Chair (1899), No. 209 Armchair (ca. 1900), Otto Wagner’s No. 247 Postal Savings Bank Chair (1904), and Josef Hoffmann’s No. 811 (1925). In the early years of the 20th century, Gebrüder Thonet also began producing designs in bent tubular steel by Bauhaus masters like Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Mart Stam.

In the aftermath of World War II, Thonet lost all of its production facilities in Eastern Europe, and the sales office at Vienna’s Stephansplatz had been destroyed. Between 1945 and 1953, Georg Thonet, the great-grandson of company founder Michael Thonet, led the rebuilding. Economic success returned quickly. In the ensuing decades, the company commissioned designs from many outstanding designers, such as Verner Panton, Pierre Paulin, Norman Foster, James Irvine, Piero Lissoni, and Stefan Diez. Classic Thonet pieces can be found in museum collections around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou and Musée d'Orsay in Paris, the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, and the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

In 1976 Thonet was divided into two separate German and Austrian companies, which remain independent of each other. Today, Thonet GmbH is headquartered in Frankenberg, Germany and continues to manufacture the original, bentwood and tubular steel designs alongside new pieces by contemporary, international architects and designers. Originally opened in 1861 by Thonet himself, the furniture factory TON (Továrna Ohýbaného Nábytku), which is located in what is known today as the Czech Republic, continues to manufacture Thonet designs. 

* All images courtesy of Thonet.de