„Weiß, alles weiß?“

Josef Franks Haus Beer (1930) in Wien und seine Materialität im Kontext des Diskurses über die weißen Kuben

Abstract

“White, everything white?“
Josef Frank‘s Villa Beer (1930) in Vienna and its materiality in the context of the discourse on the “white cubes”
A recent conservation-science study of the materials used in the construction of Josef Frank’s main work, the Villa Beer (1930) in Vienna-Hietzing, and in particular those used on the building’s surfaces, was an opportunity to find evidence of whether the contemporary description of the wall colour as a non-colour white corresponded to physical reality. The notion “Weiß, alles weiß” (“white, everything white”), celebrated as “an expression of values and of the times”, is identified as a cultural construct that stands in contradiction to the actual materiality of the buildings of the period. We must rewrite the Colour history of Modern Movement architecture. The white cubes were never white.