The Modern Interior

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both grew from it and was integral to it. Wagner’s famous interior for
Vienna’s Post Office Savings Bank, one of the most rational architectural
designs of those years, depended, nonetheless, on a use of decoration. His
employment of small, geometric, decorative details included carefully
positioned rows of covered rivets on the supporting side columns. Some
were genuinely structural while others were added for decorative effect.
Hoffmann adopted a similarly restrained, abstract, geometrical approach
to his interior designs for the Purkersdorf Sanatorium, created between
1904 and 1906, while, as we have seen, in the private spaces he created
for the Stoclet family in Brussels between 1905 and 1911, he pushed his
modern decorative language much further, letting the texture of the
marble and the patterned surfaces of his specially designed fabrics and
other items of household equipment combine to create a luxurious, harmonious
and sumptuous whole. 13 In a room used for entertaining guests
in the Palais Stoclet, the architect employed pattern, texture and other
decorative details. The inclusion of a piano and a small stage for domestic
performances reinforced the theatricality of the space recalling Adolf
Loos’s use of spaces within spaces in the Moller house. Some of the more
intimate spaces of the Palais Stoclet were less elaborate, however. ‘The
An entertainment room in the Palais Stoclet, Brussels, designed by Josef Hoffmann,
1905–11, illustrated in The Studio, 1914.