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Frank, Josef
(b Baden, nr Vienna, 15 July 1885; d Stockholm, 8 Jan 1967). Austrian architect, interior designer, teacher and writer. He studied architecture at the Technische Hochschule, Vienna, and then worked for a year with Bruno Möhring in Berlin. After a study visit to Italy he established himself as an independent architect in Vienna in 1910, building in the period before World War I a number of single-family houses distinguished by highly simplified forms and balanced proportions; examples include the Villa Hoch (1912) and Villa Wassermann (1914), both in Vienna. After the war he taught at the Kunstgewerbeschule, Vienna (1919–25), and collaborated with Adolf Loos and others in the Viennese garden city movement, which was based on English models. He took a leading role in the construction of cooperatively run garden suburbs and also contributed five residential buildings, several storeys high, to Vienna’s communal housing scheme, for example Winarskyhof (1924). Frank played a significant role in the propagation of artistic innovation in the early 20th century. As a member of both the Deutscher Werkbund and Österreichischer Werkbund, he took part in many exhibitions, including those at the Weissenhofsiedlung (1927) in Stuttgart and at the Werkbund colony (1932) in Vienna. As Vice-President (1928–32) of the Österreichischer Werkbund he argued for the Neues Bauen movement in traditionalist Austria, while warning against exaggerated forms and industrialized techniques of the new doctrine in Germany—a view that was at odds with some of the more dogmatic theories of CIAM, Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus. As an interior designer he created numerous fabric designs, characterized by brightly coloured motifs drawn from a variety of cultures. In 1925 he founded an interior furnishing business, Haus und Garten, in Vienna (see AUSTRIA, §VI, 4). In 1933, as a result of increasing politicization in Austria, he settled in Sweden, and worked for the rest of his life for the interior design firm Svenskt Tenn. His fabric and furniture designs contributed to the development of the new Swedish furnishing style that became known internationally as ‘Swedish modern’. From 1941 to 1946 he was a teacher at the New School for Social Research, New York. Frank was also a writer, contributing to many journals; for a photograph of him see CIAM.
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