Stoclet Palace’s kitchen: 3D restitution hypothesis (1911)

Supervisor: David Lo Buglio

Submitted on September 2025

Original title: Le Palais Stoclet de Josef Hoffmann : Hypothèse de restitution numérique de la cuisine à son état de 1911.

This master’s thesis proposes a digital restitution hypothesis of the Stoclet Palace's kitchen, designed by the architect Josef Hoffmann. A major work of the Viennese Secession and listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2009, the interior of the building remains largely unknown to the general public. Developed as a continuation of the research project “Stoclet 1911 – Restitution”, conducted in collaboration between urban.brussels and the ULB – Faculté d’Architecture La Cambre-Horta, this thesis focuses on a secondary yet functionally essential space of the palace that has been less documented than its well-known ceremonial rooms. The study is based on the precise analysis of a heterogeneous corpus of archival sources, including historical photographs, technical drawings, and written records from Belgian and Austrian archives. It aims to produce a realistic 3D restitution of the kitchen (representing a hypothetical state of the room between 1911 and 1918 rather than its current condition), thereby reinforcing the immersive quality of the model. Particular attention is given to the methodological process, from archival interpretation to digital modeling and visual restitution. Furthermore, the research addresses the challenges of incomplete and fragmented documentation by assessing and representing uncertainty. This is achieved through the use of evaluation scales – such as degrees of certainty and distance to sources – allowing each element of the model to be critically qualified.