The Wiener Werkstätte
Vienna Workshop was a direct offshoot from the fin-de-siècleVienna Secession. Together,
Josef Hoffmann and Koloman
Moser founded the Wiener Werkstätte Produktiv-Gemeinschaft von Kunsthandwerken,
Wien (the Viennese Workshop and Production Cooperative of Art Works in Vienna)
in 1903. The concept was modeled after Charles Robert Ashbee's Guild of Handicraft.
By 1905 it had over a hundred craftsmen, its forte being handmade metalware whose
reductive style belied its dependence on hand production. A change in style around
1915 (proto-Art Deco)
from Hoffmann's rectilinear style to a more florid, organic
approach presaged its decline.
