The Villa Beer in Vienna, one of Frank’s most important commissions.
Photo by Stefan Oláh.A companion catalog, comprising essays from over two dozen design scholars, provides context for Frank’s creative successes and setbacks, as well as his philosophies and concepts, including “accidentism,” which encouraged the acquisition of furniture pieces one at a time, and combining them with old or existing ones. “The living room in which one can live and think freely is neither beautiful nor harmonic nor photogenic,” he wrote in an essay published in the Swedish design magazine Form in 1958. “It is the product of coincidences; it is never finished and can accommodate everything that can fulfill the changing needs of its occupants. I use the living room as an example here because I want to employ it as a means to arrive at an architectural principle. The living room for us is, so to speak, the ultimate goal of architecture because it is the most important component of the house.”
Over the course of his career, Frank, who died in 1967 in Stockholm, created a range of structures, from single-family houses with gardens to public housing projects, as well as over 1,000 furniture pieces and 200 textiles, many of which are still in production by the Swedish design house Svenskt Tenn. “A well-ordered house,” he wrote, “is to be laid out as a city with streets and roads, which necessarily lead to squares, that are disconnected from traffic, so that one can rest in them.”
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