Josef Frank, Architect and Designer: An Alternative Vision of the Modern Home

Throughout his extraordinary career in architecture and interior design, Austrian Josef Frank (1885-1967) charted an original and complex version of modernism that expressed a unique view of the modern home, the single-family house, and its furnishings. This book - the first in English to analyze and interpret Frank's many achievements - brings his contributions out of obscurity and reveals the full scope of his alternative interpretation of the modern movement. In addition to ten essays on Frank's life and work, this book includes illustrations of 135 of Frank's architectural, furniture, and fabric designs, shown primarily in color. They trace his development as an architect and designer, from his early days in Vienna through his years in exile in Stockholm and New York. A selected list of his buildings, projects, and interior designs is found in the appendix. The book accompanies an exhibition of the same title mounted in May 1996 at The Bard Graduate Center in New York City.

The first comprehensive English-language study of versatile but lesser-known modernist Frank, this volume accompanies an exhibition of the same title at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts. It consists of 135 color illustrations and ten scholarly essays that place Frank's work within the context of European modernism. Deeply influenced by the emerging International Style of the 1910s and 1920s, Frank was primarily interested in the totality of the domestic environment; he designed not only houses but also furnishings, textiles, and decorative objects. The essayists examine the range of Frank's work, his exile to Sweden and the United States in the 1930s, and the theoretical relation to much better known contemporaries Alvar Aalto, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Adolph Loos, and Le Corbusier. Each essayist presents the material thoroughly, with clarity, and with particular sensitivity to Frank's place within the larger spectrum of the revolutionary aspects of European architecture and design at the time. The illustrations are an especially valuable and well-focused snapshot of Frank's protean interests, from the United Nations' headquarters to a perfectly proportioned glass accessory box, and the relation of the houses, both in plan and elevation, to the smaller objects he designed becomes distinct. This is a scholarly and exhaustive analysis that will be useful to specialists and knowledgeable readers. Recommended for architectural and decorative arts collections.?Paul Glassman, Pratt Inst. Lib., New York
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.