Josef Frank

1885 — 1967

Austrian architect Josef Frank fled Nazism for Sweden at the age of 50, then fled again to New York.  Frank was polarized against the “home is a machine for living in” principles of figures like Le Corbusier, and feared that uniformity in design would make people all the same.  He embraced pattern, color, and mythological shapes, rejecting monochromatic palettes as “uneasy” – a thought in stark contrast to ideas of calm that persisted at the time.