Born: November 23, 1806 in Geisenheim
Died: January 3, 1889 in San Remo, Italy

Philipp Hoffmann was born as the first child of Johann Jakob Hoffmann (1772 - 1838), a princely Metternich bailiff, and his wife Elisabeth, née Hertling (1788 - 1849). He came from a distinguished family of senior civil servants, musicians and scholars. After mostly private tuition, he began studying architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich in 1826, where Friedrich von Gärtner (1791 - 1847) was his most important teacher. Educational trips initially took Hoffmann to Berlin, Vienna and Italy before he entered the service of the Duchy of Nassau as a "Bauaccessist" (building assessor) in 1830 and took up his duties in 1832. In 1866, like almost all civil servants, he was transferred to the Prussian civil service, retired as a royal senior building officer in 1870 and in 1886 was honored with the title of "Geheimer Ober-Hof-Baurath" awarded by Emperor Wilhelm I. Alongside Georg Christian Carl Boos, who had been in state service in Nassau since 1835, Hoffmann was the most important architect of Romantic Historicism in Wiesbaden. However, his work is more extensive and varied than that of Boos. His first major work in Geisenheim was the double tower front and the two western bays as well as the central nave vault of the Catholic parish church of the Holy Cross (1834 - 1839), the so-called "Rheingau Cathedral", in the neo-Gothic style, which he thoroughly mastered.

It is therefore all the less understandable that he considered one of his main works, the church of St. Boniface on Luisenplatz in Wiesbaden (1843 - 1849), to be Romanesque simply because he was careful to avoid the pointed arch. Between 1840 and 1844, he had created the chapel at Rheinstein Castle in the pure forms of neo-Gothic and from 1845 to 1847, he led the restoration work on the late Gothic St. Michael's Chapel in Kiedrich, which, however, earned him criticism from the Association for Nassau Antiquities and Historical Research. In their opinion, he had replaced too much of the original medieval substance. While planning the towers of the Bonifatiuskirche, which were not completed until 1866, i.e. after the Marktkirche had been finished, due to a lack of funds, he must have recognized the difference between Romanesque and Gothic, as these, like the five towers of the Marktkirche, follow the famous Gothic tower of Freiburg Minster.

A second major work crowning the city with its five golden domes is the Russian Orthodox Church of St. Elisabeth (also known as the Greek or Russian Chapel) on the Neroberg, built between 1846 and 1855 as a funeral chapel for Elisabeth Mikhailovna Romanova, Duchess of Nassau, who died young. A study trip to Russia introduced him to the historical architectural forms of a cross-domed church, which he combined with his memories of Italian Renaissance central buildings. Of all the Russian churches being built at the time, the Russian Orthodox church in Wiesbaden was the only one to have a special national cultural significance.

The synagogue on Michelsberg, built by Hoffmann between 1863 and 1869, would also have been accorded this status due to its orientalizing, picturesquely richly decorated design, had it not been destroyed during the Reichspogromnacht in 1938. In addition to the buildings mentioned, the round viewing temple on the Neroberg (1851/1852), the restoration and redecoration of the rooms of the government building destroyed by fire in 1854 (1855 - 1857), the elementary school on the Schulberg (1861 - 1863; today's Kunsthaus) and the Waterloo memorial on Luisenplatz (1865) should also be mentioned. As a civil servant in the service of the Kingdom of Prussia, he built the Kaiser-Wilhelms-Heilanstalt on Schlossplatz from 1868 to 1871 as well as the Kurhaus (1873 - 1879) and the English Church (1874) in Bad Schwalbach (Langenschwalbach until 1927). Philipp Hoffmann left behind a particularly rich, varied and imaginative life's work. Sketchbooks with studies of buildings and styles from all eras as well as a large number of drawings and watercolors have been preserved. He was a committed member of several associations, including founding member and board member of the "Gesellschaft von Freunden bildender Kunst" in 1847, which later became the Nassauischer Kunstverein e.V.. He was buried in the old cemetery on Platter Straße, where a memorial stone still commemorates him today.