Austrian architect, designer and craftsman, Josef Hoffmann was a co-founder in 1897 of the Vienna Secession and in 1903 of the Wiener Werkstaette - a group of workshops and studios which enjoyed widespread success far almost thirty years. A pupil of Otto Wagner, in whose studio he worked for a short time in 1895 on his return from a year in Italy, Holfmann’s work combined the rationalism of Wagner with a geometrical, rectilinear style of decoration influenced by the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. During the years preceding the First World War he designed several villas in Vienna as well as his two masterpieces - the Purkersdorf Sanatorium (1903) and the Palais Stoclet Brussels (1905-11). He was appointed city architect of Vienna in 1920 and continued to work until after the Second World War, producing housing schemes in Vienna as well as pavilions for the 1914 Cologne Werkbund exhibition, the 1925 Paris exhibition and the Venice Biennale of 1934. Hoffmann taught at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts from 1899 to 1937. Hoffmann's first furniture designs were simple pieces with lattice decorations for Joseph Maria Olbrich's Secession Building of 1898. By 1900, In the furniture shown at the Paris exhibition, he had abandoned curvilinear decoration in favour of the angular forms, geometrical decoration and smooth surfaces, which were to become the major characteristics of the mature Secession style. The chair designs published in 1901 clearly derive from the work of Mackintosh, but add functional purpose to the latter's aesthetic achievements. Hoffmann designed for the Wiener Werkstaette well-proportioned chairs whose cubistic forms and restricted colour schemes (primarily black and white) anticipated the stylistic preoccupations al the 1920s and 30s. The Werkstaette served a rich, sophisticated cosmopolitan clientele and worked on the principle that quality could only be obtained if each piece was personally designed and each step of its creation supervised by the designer, with a total rejection al machine production. Hoffmann's designs far the Werkstaette thus unite extreme individuality and painstaking hand craftsmanship with the concern far truth to materials and functionalism which characterised all his work. As well as his Werkstaette chairs, Hoffmann also produced designs, which were manufactured by Kohan & Kohan using the bentwood technique. Unlike his architecture, which was nicknamed Quadratstil because of its relentless use al the square; Hoffmann's bentwood chairs exploit the circle as their major motif.