Josef Hoffman was born in Pirnitz, Moravia (now Chechoslovakia) in 1870. He studied architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna under Carl von Hasenauer and Otto Wagner, whose theories of a functional, modern architecture profoundly effected his architectural works. He won the Rome prize in 1895 and the following year joined the Wagner's office.

Hoffman established his own office in 1898 and taught at the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule from 1899 until 1936. He was a founding member of the Vienna Secession, a group of revolutionary artists and architects. He actively supported the group by designing its exhibitions and writing for the magazine Ver Sacrum. In 1903 he helped found the Wiener Werkstate.

In 1905, he established the Kuntschau with painter Glustav Klimt and two years later, founded the Destscher Werkbund. Like Otto Wagner, his early projects were conceived as Gesamtkunstwerke (total works of art) and he produced both free-standing and built-in furniture for his interiors, pared-down rectilinear pieces, elongated to emphasize their structural role. Hoffmann is well-known for the simple, restrained, yet visually interesting dining chairs, several intended for cafes, that he designed early in the 20th century. His "birdhouse" chair, for example, reveals his way of using a decorative feature to emphasize structure. Hoffmann worked well into his eighth decade, continuing to use the geometric motifs that would influence the Art Deco Style of the 1920s.

Although Hoffman's earliest works belong to a Secessionist tangent of the Art Nouveau, his later works introduced a vocabulary of regular grids and squares. The functional clarity and abstract purity of his later works mark him as an important precursor of the Modern Movement.

His designs are concentrated on abstract and geometric shapes. While he did not reject traditional decoration out of hand, he succeeded in making it serve structural principles which he believed should determine the form of buildings, interiors and objects. Hoffmann studied architecture at the Vienna Academy where he was taught by Otto Wagner. Between 1901 and 1905, he designed four villas in Vienna and a sanatorium for which he developed a "cubistic" language of form with its emphasis on straight, unadorned lines.

In 1928 his work appeared in the Art and Industry exhibition held at Macy’s store in New York, where it exerted a strong influence on American designer Donald Desky. Hoffmann is one of the seminal figures in the modern decorative arts movement of the first half of the 20th century.

A highly individualistic architect and designer, Hoffman's work combined the simplicity of craft production with a refined aesthetic ornament. He died in Vienna in 1956.