Two Designs for an Item of Jewelry, undated

As a co-founder of the Wiener Werkstätte, the architect Josef Hoffmann (1870–1956) set new standards in the creation of interiors and objects of everyday use by skillfully applying architectural basic principles, such as tectonics, mass shifting, rhythm and dynamics, to his designs. With this design for an item of jewelry in the shape of a colored drawing, executed using ink, watercolor and gold paint, Hoffmann proved his perpetual willingness to abandon conventions and to develop a new design vocabulary through the variation of existing solutions. Aside from his references to Antiquity, his oeuvre is also shaped by influences from Far Eastern design principles as well as by the use of the basic geometrical forms of circle, triangle and rectangle. But it was especially the square, as a shape which doesn’t exist in nature with such precision, that Hoffmann elevated to a fundamental principle of his designs and thus to an insignia of the Wiener Werkstätte.

MH, 2023