Alan I.W. Frank, 87, should know what it’s like to live in a Bauhaus property better than anyone. He’s lived in one almost his whole life.
In 1937, Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer arrived in the United States and began teaching at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. The following year, Mr. Frank’s father, Robert, the owner of a steel firm, heard Mr. Gropius lecture about his ideas for a new architecture and found it so inspiring, he commissioned the pair to build a family home.
During its construction, Alan Frank, not even 10 years old, wandered the building site and peppered the architects with questions about what was being built. “They were both very cordial,” Mr. Frank recalled.
Breuer did not just design the home, but every fitting and piece of furniture in it, so every chair and doorknob is unique to the property.
Breuer is perhaps most remembered today for the chairs he designed at the Bauhaus built from single pieces of tubular steel bent into shape, with leather straps slung across them for seats. They are still sold today.
According to a 1941 review of the property in the magazine Architectural Forum, the Frank house was “evidence that contemporary architecture is entering a new phase: Richer, more assured and more human.” But Breuer and Gropius split as a professional team in 1941, and few other properties like it were built.
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