Pair of Skyscraper Bookcases

Austrian-born Paul Theodore Frankl was a major proponent of American Art Deco style. Trained as an architect in Vienna, he moved to New York in 1914. In the 1920s he began designing Art Deco furniture, which he exhibited to great acclaim at the 1925 Paris Exposition. A prolific writer, Frankl published works on Modern design theory, including his seminal 1928 text "New Dimensions."

Architecture and the decorative arts responded dramatically to the urban sensibility that flourished between the world wars. The new materials and mechanized techniques of the twentieth century demanded new forms. Furniture designers were inspired by the skyscraper building boom of the 1920s, and Frankl in particular incorporated the new aesthetic of architecture into his furniture designs. He is best known for his “skyscraper” furniture of the 1920s and 1930s—desks, cabinets, and bookcases that incorporated elements of various heights in imitation of the skyscraper. Frankl imagined this furniture as solving the problem of cramped apartment living in the same way as the skyscraper solved the problem of urban growth.

Considering the amount of great Art Deco architecture in Cincinnati - the Carew Tower and the Cincinnati Museum Center are just two examples - it is not surprising that Cincinnatian Mrs. James M. Hutton II (née Marianne Wurlitzer) decorated her home in this popular style.