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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