White, Everything White? Josef Frank's Villa Beer in Vienna and Its Materiality in the Context of the Discourse on ‘White Cubes’
White, Everything White? Josef Frank's Villa Beer in Vienna and Its Materiality in the Context of the Discourse on ‘White Cubes’

Summary/Abstract: 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 of the building’s surfaces was an opportunity to find evidence indicating whether the contemporary description of the wall color as a noncolor white corresponded to physical reality. The notion “Weiss, alles Weiss” (“white, everything white”), celebrated as “an expression of values and of the times” (Hammann, 1930), has been identified as a cultural construct that stands in contradiction to the actual materiality of the buildings of the period. It has become necessary to rewrite the color history of Modern Movement architecture: the white cubes were never white.

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