DesignerAustrian-American
Paul T. Frankl
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Born in Vienna on October 14, 1886, Paul T. Frankl grew up in a prosperous household, the son of a real estate speculator, before leaving Austria to pursue architectural studies at the Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg. He moved through Berlin and Copenhagen before boarding a ship to New York in April 1914, arriving just months before the outbreak of the First World War. He never returned to Europe as a resident, and America became both his subject and his laboratory.
New York in the 1920s offered Frankl exactly the raw material he needed. The city was building upward at a pace no European capital could match, and Frankl turned that verticality into furniture. His Skyscraper series, bookcases, desks, and cabinets constructed from maple and lacquered wood with stepped, setback profiles, translated the jagged silhouettes of Manhattan's skyline directly into domestic objects. Produced from around 1925 onward and sold through Frankl Galleries on 48th Street, these pieces were not decorative nods to architecture; they were furniture that thought of itself as architecture. The series made him the most visible proponent of a distinctly American modernism, one that did not simply import European ideas but built on local conditions.
Frankl was equally active as a writer and organizer. He published "New Dimensions" in 1928 and "Form and Re-Form" in 1930, articulating a design philosophy grounded in honesty of materials, functional purpose, and the visual energy of industrial America. That same year he co-founded the American Union of Decorative Artists and Craftsmen (AUDAC), gathering designers, architects, and craftspeople under a shared modernist agenda. His books and lectures reached audiences well beyond the design community and helped establish a public conversation about what American style could mean.
In 1934, Frankl relocated to Los Angeles, opening a gallery on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. The move shifted his clientele toward Hollywood: Fred Astaire, Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Walter Huston, and Alfred Hitchcock all acquired pieces from him. The California context softened his aesthetic. He moved away from the angular geometry of the Skyscraper years toward rattan, cork veneer, and the biomorphic forms that would define his later work. He also taught at the University of Southern California and the Chouinard Art Institute, influencing a generation of West Coast designers.
From the 1940s onward, Frankl worked with manufacturers including Brown Saltman of California and the Johnson Furniture Company of Grand Rapids, bringing his design sensibility into wider production. His output from this period, relaxed, organic, suited to informal California living, stands at some remove from the Skyscraper pieces, but both bodies of work reflect the same underlying principle: design should respond to its cultural moment rather than to inherited conventions.
Frankl died in Los Angeles on March 21, 1958. His work is held in major American collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and the High Museum of Art. At auction, his Skyscraper-period pieces command the strongest prices: a pair of side tables achieved $63,000 at Sotheby's New York in 2020, and his early bookcases and cabinets regularly appear at Christie's, Sotheby's, and specialist design sale rooms. The rattan and cork work of the California years has found a growing collector base as interest in mid-century California design has expanded.