Josef Hoffmann's training and career as an architect ran parallel to that of his colleague Adolf Loos from Brno. While the two men represented beacons of hope for architecture and design in fin-de-siecle Vienna, in the course of their development as artists they were to become bitter opponents over the heated debate at that time concerning ornamentation in art. Josef Hoffmann and Adolf Loos represent highly conflicting positions in this controversy: the one as co-founder of the "Secession" (1897) and the "Wiener Werkstätte" (1903), the other as author of the polemic "Ornament und Verbrechen" ("Ornament and Crime", 1908). Financed through the EU program Interreg III A Ö-CZ.
