Häuser shows an exclusive photo report on the villa in Pittsburgh

Häuser, the magazine for international architecture, design and lifestyle, has come across a so-far unknown house by Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. In its 1/2009 issue the magazine presents the villa in an exclusive photo feature.

Seventy years ago Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius and his colleague Marcel Breuer planned and designed a house for an American businessman. Häuser, the high-class magazine for international architecture, design and lifestyle has now discovered this »Bauhaus« in Pittsburgh. The villa is hardly known, because ever since its completion the owners have not allowed it to be photographed. Only now and on the occasion of the house's 90th birthday has the son of the original owner agreed to an exclusive photo production for Häuser.

The commission from businessman Robert Frank in the year 1938 covered the design of a house with an area of 1100 m² and separate garage, including the creation of the garden and a range of furniture, upholstery materials and lamps. All the interior furnishings were created by Marcel Breuer. In the foreseeable future the »Frank House« will be opened to the public in the form of a museum.

The exclusive photos in the current issue of Häuser (1/2009) show an overall work of art with gentle curves, departing for the first time from the otherwise strict geometrical forms in the work of the two émigré Bauhaus masters. The architects play with the contrast between natural materials and industrial products, contrasting lightness with weight. «In the Frank house cubic modernism enters into a liaison with organic building», explains Barry Bergdoll, curator in chief at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, adding that this places the unknown masterwork in a series containing major works by the architectural icons of the Thirties designed by Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright.

The 1/2009 issue of Häuser is dedicated entirely to the theme of the Bauhaus and is now on sale.