The Alan I W Frank House is a private residence in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, designed by Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius and partner Marcel Breuer, two of the pioneering masters of 20th-century architecture and design. This spacious, multi-level residence, its furnishings and landscaping were all created by Gropius and Breuer as a 'Total Work of Art.' In size and completeness, it is unrivaled. It was their most important residential commission, and it is virtually the same today as when it was built in 1939–40, original and authentic.
The House
With four levels of living space and an indoor swimming pool, the main building encloses 12,000 square feet, complete with curved glass facade, nine bedrooms and 13 bathrooms. Including the five terraces that are part of the house and the rooftop dance floor, the floor plan totals 17,000 square feet. The stonework of the exterior walls and the dramatic entry of this innovative house suggest a detailed and richly textured building. Inside, graceful curves prevail throughout with paneled walls of warm pearwood, English sycamore, and redwood, or of travertine or stone.
Barry Bergdoll, the Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA wrote in Hauser magazine, "The home’s three-story window wall swells in the facade next to the circular stair, which sweeps visitors from the ground floor entry and recreational area to the first-floor living area and then continues to rise to the next level. The stair is a sensuously curved cantilevered stair - the first embodiment of all the cantilevered stairs of independent slab risers that Breuer would make a signature of his American work. The theme is echoed in a sculptural outside stair of concrete taking visitors from the front to the back garden via an open terrace, an alternative dramatic path through the house. Perception of the house includes both theatricality of approach and intimacy of scale. Effects are achieved through natural materials set in contrast with man-made products, through ratios of light and heavy, closed and open, and through dramatic lighting and staging of movement on the wooded sloping site."
Unique features of this home include roof surfaces that support living lawns and contribute to thermal efficiency, innovative electrical and energy management systems that reduce energy use, and one of the first examples of central air conditioning with electrostatic air purification.
Architectural significance
In addition to being the largest residence designed by Gropius and Breuer, the Frank House was also the largest project of any kind that Gropius would undertake between the completion of the Bauhaus buildings in Dessau, Germany in the mid-1920s and the commission for graduate housing granted him after World War II by Harvard. As for Breuer, he would have to wait until 1953, with the design of UNESCO headquarters in Paris, for another architectural commission of such scale. The 17,000-square-foot house is one of the “most important modernist houses in this country” relates Bergdoll.
The Frank House has been described as a unique synthesis between the modernism of the interwar years and the sumptuous ethos of Breuer's so-called New Humanism. As Bergdoll writes in Hauser, "Unlike the Meisterhäuser at Dessau, where a machined aesthetic of stucco rendered walls and floating boxes defined a rigorous geometric approach to composition, the Frank House uses gently swelling curves set in facades of long horizontal lines, exterior walls of warm pink-sand colored Kasota stone over a steel framework, all set upon a rugged base of local field stone, echoed in the garden’s terrace walls."
Contemporary critics saw the Frank House as a prime example of a change in direction in the development of modernism. “In its use of random ashlar, stone veneer, travertine and natural wood is indicated a new interest in natural materials. Also worth noting is the disintegration of the rectangle into freer shapes, as in the stairway, garden walls and entrance vestibule. If in so important an example such drastic modifications are to be seen, there is a new and impressive evidence that contemporary architecture is entering a new phase, richer, more assured, and more human.”