Mikael Bergquist – författare

Mellan 1924 och 1936 ritade den österrikiske arkitekten och formgivaren Josef Frank fem sommarhus i Falsterbo. Husen tillkom under Franks intensiva yrkesperiod, när han klev fram som en av Europas främsta och intressantaste arkitekter. Här presenteras de fem husen med ett unikt bild- och ritningsmaterial. Arkitekturen i Falsterbovillorna är inte påflugen, den håller sig i bakgrunden men talar när den blir tillfrågad. Det är en arkitektur som ifrågasätter invanda föreställningar om skönhet och funktion, som är modern och traditionell på samma gång. Falsterbovillorna hör till några av Franks absolut finaste verk. Med den här boken öppnas dörrarna till en annars svåråtkomlig svensk arkitekturskatt som åttio år efter sin tillkomst inte förlorat något av sin aktualitet. Värd att besöka och återbesöka, att fortsatt inspireras och fascineras av.

Josef Frank, born 1885 in Baden near Vienna, ranks among Europe's most significant architects of the twentieth century. His designs for furniture and textiles also make him one of the eminent figures of modernist interior design. Born into a Jewish family, growing anti-Semitism forced him to emigrate in 1933. He first went to Sweden and in 1939 to the USA, returning to Sweden again in 1947, where he lived and worked until his death in 1967.Josef Frank - Spaces is the first comprehensive book on Frank's single-family houses. It explores the evolution of his designs over the years and investigates the influences that shaped his work: Adolf Loos's spatial plan concept, Le Corbusier's ideas, and Hermann Muthesius's seminal book The English House. It also looks at Frank's own architectural concepts of movement and stairs in residential buildings. The second part features six of Frank's houses in greater detail, including images and plans, and in descriptive texts that also interpret their characteristics. The selection comprises the villas Claëson and Wehtje in Falsterbo, Sweden, the villas Wien XIII and Beer in Vienna, the House MS in Los Angeles, and the unrealised Fantasy House 9 (Accidental House). A complete catalogue of Frank's single-family houses rounds out the book.

Between 1924 and 1936, Austrian-born architect Josef Frank built five holiday homes on the Falsterbo Peninsula in southern Sweden. Conceived as summer houses for friends and relatives of Frank's Swedish wife, the Falsterbo Villas constitute a key part of Frank's architectural work and demonstrate the principles at the core of his housing designs. In 2016, Villa Carlsten, the smallest of the Falsterbo houses, underwent an extensive restoration. Published on the occasion of its completion, Josef Frank: Villa Carlsten is the first book to comprehensively document the building. As with all of Frank's housing designs, Villa Carlsten sees the architect paying special attention to the connection between interior and exterior, to the availability of daylight, and to inhabitants' movements through the building. A particular part of Villa Carlsten's charm is its scale, as everything is of slightly smaller dimensions than one would expect. Despite its intricate layout, however, Villa Carlsten is also one of Frank's most accessible homes, and the design is full of wit, combining comfort with modern refinement. Beautifully designed with seventy-five full-colour photographs by Mikael Olsson, who adeptly highlights the home's qualities and relationship with its surroundings, the book also includes an essay by Mikael Bergquist, who realised the renovation and places Villa Carlsten in context with the other Falsterbo Villas and Frank's broader work.

This book brings together five vacation homes in Sweden designed by Stockholm-based architect Mikael Bergquist. Realised over more than two decades, they are all located in the Swedish countryside and rooted in the Nordic tradition of timber construction and the simplicity and economy of Sweden’s historic farm buildings. Bergquist’s great attention to detail and careful choice of materials characterise these houses. They are united also by a close relationship to the surrounding landscape and nature, which is enhanced as an experience by the concepts of movement and the placement of passages between the outside and inside.The houses are documented with photographs as well as plans and sections. In his supplementary essay, Bergquist writes about the special position of working as an architect on the periphery of Europe. He draws a picture of Swedish architecture that is marked by what he calls “fruitful misunderstandings” of current movements, and one in which the poverty of the rural population has been a major factor in the evolution of the design and construction of dwellings.