I’m an American architect in 21st-century New York City. My everyday silverware was designed in 1906 by an Austrian architect in Vienna. When I’m setting the dinner table and polishing stray fingerprints from the forks, knives, and spoons, my mind often drifts to the early 1900s. It was an era of manifestos, both political and artistic, and a time when design could change the world. At the heart of the tumult was Josef Hoffmann, whose vision is as powerfully influential in our day as it was in his own—in museums and interiors, and on tables such as mine. This month, the MAK Museum of Applied Arts, in Vienna, commemorates the 150th anniversary of his birth with the opening of the exhibition “Josef Hoffmann: Progress Through Beauty.” (The show was postponed by a year due to the coronavirus.)
Hoffmann was born in 1870, in what was then Moravia, to a prosperous German family. His father owned a textile mill, and the company’s discarded wooden printing blocks were young Hoffmann’s favorite childhood toy.
