Daily Dose 1192

Josef Frank - Watercolours and Fabrics

Daily Dose From now to your death 1192 | Josef Frank - Watercolours and Fabrics "When the architect and designer Josef Frank published his essay “Accidentism” in the Swedish journal Form, in 1958, he was 73 years old and living in semi-retirement in Stockholm. “Accidentism” was the ultimate statement of his long-standing disquiet with the tenets of mainstream European modernism. It was far from his first. Frank had emerged as a vocal critic of the new building style already in the late 1920s, even as its principles were first being fully articulated, and his attacks over the next three decades were unremitting. It was not that Frank rejected altogether the possibilities of a new architecture, or that he desired a return to past forms; rather, it was that he objected vigorously to the notion that modernism could or ever should be monolithic or narrowly defined. “Away with universal styles,” he wrote. “Away with the idea of equating art and industry, away with the whole system that has become popular under the name of functionalism.” He proposed that “we should design our surroundings as if they originated by chance.” Christopher Long for Places. Images from Accidentism: Josef Frank , Birkhäuser, 2016 Thanks to Petra Schmid.