Profession: architect

Hoffmann was a major figure in modernist design; his work at its best showed a clarity of form and purpose, informed by high craft ideals, and helped pave the way for the industrial aesthetic of the 20th C. Loos was a schoolmate, then fellow architectural student. Wagner was an influential teacher; Olbrich was met working in Wagner’s office, and these three, together with Klimt and Moser, founded the Vienna Secession. Hoffmann and his close colleague Moser then left to found the Wiener Werkstätte. The young Le Corbusier met him while visiting Vienna, while Mackintosh and Ashbee were met on a visit to Britain, .

It is hard to over-estimate Behrens’ importance; noted as a pioneer of modern architecture as well as of corporate identity, he should be equally celebrated as a visionary industrial designer – a field he more or less invented. Kandinsky and he became friends as young members of the Munich Secession (he later invited Kandinsky to head up a painting programme in Düsseldorf). Muthesius, Olbrich and Riemerschmid were among fellow-founders of the Deutscher Werkbund. But sometimes cited as the greatest of all his products – all young assistants in his office – are three giants of design and design education, Corbusier, Mies and Gropius.

Rietveld is known particularly for two modernist classics — a chair and a house. Among de Stijl colleagues, Oud was a good friend (probably united by the impossibility of getting on for long with the dominating van Doesburg), while Mondrian and he probably never met, despite living quite close to one another. Van der Leck had been met through one of Rietveld’s architecture teachers. Rietveld was one of the founding members of an international forum initiated by Corbusier and Giedion, attending the first meeting with Stam and Chareau among others. Stam and Lissitzky together visited him at the Schröder House.

Stam, generally less well-known than deserved, was one of the most significant European artists and designers of the 1920’s and 30’s. He was the first to come up with a tubular steel chair (winning a case against Breuer to establish this). Mies selected him to feature in a famous showcase of modernist architecture. Gropius wanted him to lead the Bauhaus’s architecture department (he declined). He worked briefly with Poelzig. Lissitzky was a close friend, and like Rietveld and to some extent Corbusier, Giedion and van Eesteren, a collaborator and colleague in the pursuit of advanced ideas about architecture and planning.