Gio Ponti
1891–1979
The architect, editor and teacher who set the terms of Italian design for fifty years, and made a chair light enough to lift with one finger.
1870–1956
Vienna Secession architect who reduced a chair to a grid of squares in 1910, decades before anyone would have called that modern.
Why they matter
Hoffmann studied under Otto Wagner at the Vienna Academy, was a founding member of the Vienna Secession, and in 1903 co-founded the Wiener Werkstätte with Koloman Moser. The workshop's argument was that a building, its furniture, its cutlery and its wallpaper should be a single designed object, and the Palais Stoclet in Brussels, built between 1905 and 1911, carries that argument out completely.
The furniture is geometric to the point of severity: the Sitzmaschine of 1905 for the Purkersdorf sanatorium, the Fledermaus chair for the cabaret of the same name, and the Kubus armchair of 1910, which is a cube built from quilted squares.
The Wiener Werkstätte was liquidated in 1932. What made these designs available again was Wittmann, which began reissuing the Kubus and other pieces in the 1960s and produces them still.
Available now
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Key forms & materials
Forms
- Kubus armchair
- Kubus sofa
- Sitzmaschine
- Fledermaus chair
- Bentwood side chair
Materials
- Bentwood
- Beech
- Leather
- Ebonised wood
- Brass
What to look for
Marks, editions, patina and production partners — fact-checked for this designer.
- A Kubus sofa is almost certainly Wittmann production from the 1960s onward rather than a 1910 object, and no evidence of a period Wiener Werkstätte Kubus sofa has been found.
- Wittmann marks its pieces as Wittmann, which is legitimate licensed production and should be described that way rather than dated to 1910.
- Period bentwood furniture to his designs was made by J. and J. Kohn and stamped under the seat, and since Kohn merged toward Thonet by 1921, later period pieces can carry Thonet marks.
- The design date and the manufacture date are two different facts on this designer, and a catalogue entry needs both.
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