PITTSBURGH, PA.-Richard Armstrong, The Henry J. Heinz II director of Carnegie Museum of Art, announced today that the museum has received a $60,000 grant from The Heinz Endowments to produce a fully illustrated book on the Alan I W Frank House, a masterwork of American modernist architecture, furniture, and landscape design. The Frank house, located in Pittsburgh’s Shadyside neighborhood, was designed in 1939–1940 by renowned architects Walter Gropius, founder and head of the Bauhaus and chairman of the department of architecture at Harvard University, and Marcel Breuer. Among the leading architects of the 20th century, they had formed their ideas about a house as a comprehensive work of art a decade earlier. The house was equally the creation of Cecelia and Robert Frank, industrialists and cultivated patrons of the arts. Robert Frank was an inventor and an engineer; he took an exceptional interest in developing the mechanical systems of the structure, making it as much an innovative machine for elegant living as a showcase of modern design technique.

The book’s major essays will be written by Barry Bergdoll, the Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and Alan I W Frank, the house’s historian. Bergdoll will detail the history of the commission and situate the house in relationship both to the important changes taking place in Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer’s architectural practice during their early years in America (1938–1941) and to the larger context of the world’s cultural history. Alan I W Frank, son of Cecelia and Robert and owner of the house, will bring the house to life, portraying it as a family’s home. The publication will include photography by Ezra Stoller, Richard Pare, and others.

An exhibition on the Frank house is scheduled to open at Carnegie Museum of Art’s Heinz Architectural Center in 2009 and travel subsequently to major museums in New York and Boston.

“The Frank house is an architectural work that is significant not only to Pittsburgh but to the world,” said Armstrong. “We are grateful to The Heinz Endowments for supporting the book that will bring this peerless artistic ensemble to the public.”

The Heinz Endowments - The Heinz Endowments supports efforts to make southwestern Pennsylvania a premier place to live and work, a center of learning and educational excellence, and a home to diversity and inclusion. Committed to helping its region thrive as a whole community—economically, ecologically, educationally, and culturally—the foundation works within Pennsylvania and elsewhere in the nation to develop solutions to challenges that are national and even international in scope. One of the largest and most innovative independent philanthropic foundations in the country, the Endowments awarded more than $55 million in grants in 2006.