Skyscraper Cabinet

c. 1927

Paul Theodore Frankl (American, born Austria, 1886–1958)

Trained as an architect in Vienna and Berlin, Paul T. Frankl immigrated to New York in 1914 and established his own gallery. There he began to design interiors and champion the skyscraper as a source of a uniquely American modernist vision. The impetus behind the Skyscraper Cabinet, however, was distinctly rural. Frankl spent the summer of 1925 in Woodstock, New York, sketching ideas for new furniture designs and renovating his cabin. In an effort to organize his books, he fitted boards together to create a cabinet with “a rather large, bulky lower section and a slender, shallow upper part going straight to the ceiling. It had a new look; the neighbors came and said, ‘It looks just like the new skyscrapers.’” From then on, Frankl experimented with spare, geometric furniture that mimicked the setback contours of New York skyscrapers. By 1926 these pieces were touted in Good Furniture magazine as the “sky-scraper type of furniture, which is as American and as New Yorkish as Fifth Avenue itself.” The Art Institute’s monumental cabinet epitomizes Frankl’s designs. Its geometric form rests on a sharply molded base and consists of a bottom cabinet section surmounted by a series of compartments and shelves arranged in a pyramidlike fashion. Smooth, unadorned surfaces exemplify the tenets of modernist design.

Status: On View, Gallery 271
Department: Arts of the Americas

Artist: Paul Theodore Frankl
Title: Skyscraper Cabinet
Place: New York City (Object made in)
Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.: c. 1927
Medium: Painted wood
Dimensions: 213.4 × 83.8 × 40 cm (84 × 33 × 15 3/4 in.)
Credit Line: Gift of the Antiquarian Society through Mr. and Mrs. Thomas B. Hunter III and Mr. and Mrs. Morris S. Weeden
Reference Number: 1998.567

Jennifer M. Downs, “ ‘The New Modern Feeling’: A Catalogue of the Collection,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 27, 2 (2001), 18, 30–32, no. 5.
Christopher Long, “Paul T. Frankl and Modern American Design” (Yale University Press, 2007), 70–71, 74, fig. 59.
Christopher Long, “The Viennese Secessionsstil and Modern American Design” Studies int he Decorative Arts 14, 2 (Spring–Summer 2007), 6–44 (ill.).
Judith A. Barter, et al., American Modernism at the Art Institute of Chicago, From World War I to 1955 (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2009), cat. 48.

Private collection, New York; private collection, Michigan, 1986; Historical Design, Inc., New York City, to 1998; sold to the Art Institute of Chicago, 1998.

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Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.

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