Author Description

This two-volume work reprints all of Frank's published writings, making the great majority of them available in English for the first time. The original, mostly German-language texts are also presented here, as are many of the illustrations that accompanied them. For more than five decades, from the 1910s to the early 1960s, the Viennese architect Josef Frank was one of the leading advocates of the new modern aesthetic and one of its most strident and vocal critics. In his many essays and his book, Architektur als Symbol, Frank sought to expose the meanings--and the failures--of modernism, to lay bare its underlying assumptions and what were, in his view, its sometimes misdirected applications. Above all, he sought to reclaim for modern design some of the freedom it had lost as it was codified.