Josef Frank – Against Design

The catalog for the 2015/16 exhibition at the MAK (Museum of Applied Arts) in Vienna is dedicated to Josef Frank (1885–1967), one of the most important Austrian architects of the 20th century. In addition to his groundbreaking architectural work, the catalog focuses his design, which remains highly influential to this day. As an architect and designer, Frank remains contemporary, having promoted a pragmatic approach to design that focused less on formal qualities and more on those of social experience. Frank's ideal of an unaffected and unpretentious practicality, aimed at an independent and sophisticated bourgeois culture of living beyond stylistic dogmas and fashionable conventions, seems more relevant than ever.