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THE THIRTEEN LETTERS OF JOSEF FRANK

G. Guaragna

Abstract

Josef Frank (1885-1967) certainly occupies a prominent place in the central European architectural scenery of the early twentieth century. His work is entirely devoted to living and of course, in addition to having designed furniture, furnishings and beautiful fabrics, Frank designs and creates architectures. The furniture and objects of furniture that he produces in Vienna at the beginning of the twenties, born on the idea of English furniture from which he takes inspiration to reinterpret the models and adapting them to new needs, perhaps throw a new light on the origins of that kind of furniture that we generally consider "Scandinavian". For Frank the language of architecture is not only a metaphor of the narration but could also become language in the strict sense; even to the point of substituting written text, as it happens for example in a singular correspondence exchange with a woman. The letters we refer to are instead those in which architecture, or better, its graphic representation, substitutes words to concretely undertake -not only conceptually- the value of prose, of the written text. Architecture that can sometimes even become an idiomatic mean of seduction, as it happens to a certain extent in the thirteen letters that Josef Frank sent to Dagmar Grill in 1947.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/sgemsocial2019V/6.1/S17.071

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