I’m Fine 113

"There is nothing wrong with mixing old and new, with combining different furniture styles, colors and patterns, anything that is in your taste will automatically fuse to form an entire, relaxing environment." -Josef Frank Josef Frank was an Austrian and later Swedish, architect and designer. He was critical of Le Corbusier’s ideals of the home as “a machine to live inside” and rejected the puritanical principles of modern architecture. He feared that standardised home interiors would result in making people homogenous and boring. Modernism, according to Josef Frank, emphasised the material, rather than the spiritual. Instead, he was inspired by freer, more artistic ideals and developed his own type of modernism where the person, comfort, homeliness, and a vivid use of colours were central. He refused to be limited by conventions and instead sought inspiration for his furniture and pattern designs from sources unrestrained by time and space. From his childhood, Josef Frank had a strong interest in botany and by the 1920s, he conjured an entire flora of his own into his pattern designs. He would mix his favourite blooms like daisies, tulips, roses, morning glories, forget-me-nots, violets, lilies of the valley, crocuses and muscari with fantasy species, often drawn in an expressionist style.