Coffee pot, cup and saucer

Around 1901, Professor Koloman Moser challenged his class at Vienna’s School of Applied Arts to redesign every aspect of daily life. In this playful coffee service, Moser and his student Jutta Sika, collaboratively created something truly novel. Subtle creative decisions were incorporated to reflect its function. For example, the cup sits off-center on the saucer, to make room for a croissant or a roll. The placement of the stenciled red circles draws attention to this unexpected positioning and gives it visual stability. About fifteen years later, Frank Lloyd used a similar scheme of overlapping circles for a porcelain service he designed to Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel. Since this service had been widely published, Wright may have been inspired by this design.

This unorthodox pattern was manufactured by Josef Böck’s porcelain factory, a relatively new firm that recognized the potential of the city’s young avant-garde. Sika went on to have a successful career as a designer and Moser was one of the co-founders of the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshops), established in 1903.