Paul T. Frankl's Skyscraper furniture.

Paul T. Frankl's Skyscraper furniture enjoyed only a brief period of popularity, from 1926 through early 1930. But his remarkable designs have come to symbolize the energy and vitality of the Jazz Age in the United States. With their stair-stepped massing and simple elemental shapes, the objects in Frankl's Skyscraper line marked the emergence of a novel and distinctive modern American design culture, one that departed from the aesthetic of the European avant-garde and affirmed American values and ideals. The story of the rise of Frankl's Skyscraper style forms a central chapter in the early development of American modernism and its rapid ascent from an experimental mode to one that would dominate the design field.

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In the early 1920s, the fortunes of modern design in the United States were at a low ebb. The arts and crafts movement had begun to wane around 1915, and the period just after World War I was a time of artistic retrenchment, during which Americans remained deeply skeptical of the fresh stylistic currents coming from Europe. Until the later 1920s, most interior decorating professionals in the United States focused on re-creating rooms based on past styles, and American home magazines--Arts and Decoration, House Beautiful, House and Garden, and Ladies Home Journal--continued to champion period revivalism as the proper expression for the American middle class.

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The first signs of impending change came with the opening of the 1925 Exposition internationale des arts decoratifs et industriels modernes in Paris. The show was the first major international design exhibition mounted after the war, and thousands of Americans crossed the Atlantic to see it. On view were the latest works from Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Italy, the Netherlands, and the Soviet Union. But most Americans were drawn to the French exhibits, which covered nearly two-thirds of the fifty-seven-acre site. Among the most popular displays were the interiors of Emile Jacques Ruhlmann (1879-1933), Georges Djo-Bourgeois (1898-1937), and other French designers whose furnishings reflected a modernized neoclassicism, an idiom that seemed less jarring to a generation of Americans who had been imbued with Beaux-Arts aesthetic principles. (1)

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In the fall of 1925, several New York department stores, including Lord and Taylor, Macy's, and John Wanamaker, exhibited pieces from the Paris exposition and other works from the foremost French designers. (2) The following year Charles R. Richards (1865-1936), who had been appointed to report on the exhibition by Herbert Hoover, then secretary of commerce, organized a traveling show of furniture and other decorative objects that made stops in New York, Chicago, Boston, and several other cities. (3) At first only a handful of American designers took advantage of the vogue for the new modern style. By the middle of 1926, Arthur Crisp, Walter W. Kantack, Max Kuehne, Eugene Schoen, and a few others were marketing their own modernist designs. But Frankl was undoubtedly the most successful of these early modernists.