Josef Hoffmann, artistic director of the Wiener Werkstätte from its inception in 1903 until 1931 (it closed for good in 1932), was a talented and prolific artist. Trained as an architect under Otto Wagner, Hoffmann established a design practice that grew to include furniture, utensils and household objects, jewelry, book bindings, posters, textiles, and wallpaper. His earlier work, exemplified by the iconic pattern of this fabric, reflects a structural or architectural view of pattern in which geometric forms are arranged to form a grid.