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A two-volume compendium of Josef Frank’s culturally critical, often witty and biting texts on modernism and architecture, offered for the first time in a complete edition alongside many of the original illustrations.
For more than five decades, from the 1910s to the early 1960s, Josef Frank was one of the leading figures of Modernism and, at the same time, one of its sharpest critics. In his many essays and articles, as well as in his book Architecture as Symbol, Frank sought to expose the layers of meaning—and the flaws—of Modernism, its underlying assumptions, and what he viewed as its often misguided implementations. Above all, this internationally renowned architect strove to reclaim for modern design some of the freedom it had lost through its dogmatization.
Editors Tano Bojankin, Christopher Long, and Iris Meder, along with award-winning Austrian designer Peter Duniecki, have compiled all available published texts by Josef Frank on these subjects into a beautiful, highly readable, collectible two-volume set. Introduced by one of America's leading architects, Denise Scott Brown, the extensive written oeuvre of Josef Frank is made accessible to both bibliophiles and a wider public interested in modernism, architecture, and one of its most influential critics.
"Few individual designers have such an enduring legacy as Josef Frank, who fled from his native Austria to Sweden in the 1930s and became involved with the now-iconic homewares shop Svenskt Tenn not long after it was founded. The fabrics he designed for the shop are instantly recognisable: each design in the vast collection is characterised by a distinctive combination of eclectic colour schemes and bold floral prints. It's hard to imagine how unusual they were at the time, as the clean lines and understated forms of modernism dominated the design world. Frank's work received lukewarm reviews from the press in Sweden when it first came out, but went on to become a defining element of Swedish culture."
—House & Garden, May 2, 2025
"Frank's Stockholm years shaped an approach that rejected 'total design', the Gesamtkunstwerk ideal of complete, controlled unity, in favor of something that centered humans and social life. He cheekily coined the term 'Accidentism', petitioning designers to leave room for spontaneity in their work. To understand the quiet radicalism of Frank’s philosophy, it helps to remember the world he was working against. In Vienna in the 1930s, modernism had hardened into dogma –rational to the point of austerity, obsessed with purity and control. Adolf Loos declared ‘ornament’ as ‘crime.’ Frank, a Jewish architect and designer in a climate hostile to both his identity and his ideas, stood apart. His clients, often fellow outsiders, sought homes that referenced design from places and times separate from their increasingly inhospitable context. In response, Frank cultivated a pluralistic approach. He filled residences with pattern, color, and personal artifacts not as decoration, but as small acts of resistance. His layered interiors were a deliberate defiance of rigidity -- arguing that comfort, individuality, history and contradiction had a rightful place in modern life. —Commune Post, November 14, 2025
"Frank was interested in liveability, and the idea of a humanistic architecture that grew with its inhabitants. His thinking on design was insightful, human-centered and extremely relevant for our times."—Ilse Crawford
"Frank brought something to Sweden that we didn't have. His work makes you happy." —Maria Wiberg, Curator, Millesgården Museum