The Modern Interior

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, har-

monious 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 domes-

tic 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

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An entertainment room in the Palais Stoclet, Brussels, designed by Josef Hoffmann,

1905 – 11 , illustrated in The Studio, 1914.