The exhibition also presents contemporary design positions in the form of object interventions that deliberately reflect Hoffmann’s style and the traditional canon of forms of the Wiener Werkstätte in order to achieve new interpretation – or “updates” – of established classics.

Along the lines of Loos’s “Wohnungswanderungen”, the Hoffmann “Apartment Tours” invite visitors to make a journey of discovery by way not only of contemporary photographs and private photographs taken by Josef Hoffmann himself but also of hitherto unexhibited private possessions: everday household items, objects that served as sources of inspiration, or pieces from his collections. Furthermore, the inclusion in the exhibition of photographs in a family album donated to the Josef Hoffmann Museum and the municipality of Brtnice by the architect’s daughter-in-law Ann Marie Hoffmann-Beerens facilitates an unprecedentedly vivid picture of the style in which Hoffmann and his family actually lived.

In addition to the rooms of the house in the Czech Republic where Josef Hoffmann was born, the exhibition focuses on three Vienna apartments associated with important phases of Hoffmann’s life and artistic development: his bachelor apartment at Magdalenenstraße 12, the apartment at Margaretenstraße 5, and finally the apartment at Neulinggasse 24. All these apartments were documented in photographic form and described in the journals Das Interieur, Hohe Warte, and Die moderne Wohnung und ihre Ausstattung.

Typical features of the surprisingly eclectic personal living style of the Otto Wagner student Josef Hoffmann are informal ensembles and heterogeneous arrangements that contrast strongly with his strictly composed and Gesamtkunstwerk-orientated public commissions. This polarity serves to clarify the characteristic features of intimate living and representative living as Hoffmann defined them, revealed in the fields of tension of two antitheses: intimate living versus representative living, and heterogeneous mixtures of patterns, styles, and periods versus homogeneous uniformity. For Josef Hoffmann, his private apartments were laboratories for experiments, places for remembering, and sources of identity.