Josef Frank

Sweden (1885-1967)

Austrian born Josef Frank emigrated to Sweden in 1934, where he worked for the Svenskt Tenn design company until his death.

His work is closely identified with the Swedish Modern aesthetic that emerged in 1930s and was widely admired in the decades following the Second World War. Before the First World War he worked on architecture and interiors including the interior of the Museum of East Asian Art in Cologne in 1910. After the war he entered academic life, becoming Professor of Building Design at the Wiener Kunstgewerbeschule in 1919, a post he held until 1925. From 1921 to 1924 he worked alongside Peter Behrens, Josef Hoffmann, Oskar Straad, and Oskar Wlach on the design of Viennese apartment buildings and, in the following year, founded the Haus und Garten interior design firm.

Most of his work in the later 1920s and early 1930s was centred on private and public housing, the most high profile of these projects being the design of a two-family home for the celebrated Deutscher Werkbund housing exhibition at Stuttgart in 1927.