Josef Hoffmann and the Poldi Phenomenon

At the end of 2024, the Moravian Gallery succeeded in acquiring a unique set of original furniture from the so-called Poldihaus or Poldi Steelworks Guest House in Kladno, completed in 1903 according to Josef Hoffmann's designs. Several fortunate circumstances led to this acquisition.

One of them was the visit of architecture historian and Harvard University professor Eduard F. Sekler to Kladno in the early 1980s. He was then working on Hoffmann's exhibition and monograph, and through other architectural works for the Wittgenstein family, he managed to trace the Kladno building. He identified it in a dilapidated house destined for demolition due to road widening. Thanks also to the renowned architecture historian and the appeals of Czech and foreign experts, the destruction was averted, and the valuable building was preserved. Another fortunate circumstance, thanks to which at least a torso of the original furnishings of the Poldihaus has survived to this day, was the effort of a former employee of the Poldi Museum, who ten years later, just before the house was sold to a private owner, saved several last pieces of furniture for the now defunct museum. For several years, they remained in his collections and care; a part was lent to the Moravian Gallery. The rest disappeared from the experts' sight after the museum's demise in 2006. Only at the end of last year did the Moravian Gallery finally manage to acquire it, and all known preserved pieces became part of its collections.

The exhibition presents not only selected pieces of furniture in their found condition, which speaks of the dramas of the time they went through from their creation and original purpose to the present. It also illuminates Josef Hoffmann's cooperation with the Kladno steel king Karl Wittgenstein and the circumstances of the creation of the inconspicuous house and its furnishings, a complex gesamtkunstwerk that in many ways was ahead of its time.

Josef Hoffmann and the Poldi Phenomenon / Josef Hoffmann und das Phänomen Poldi

June 15, 2025 – April 26, 2026