The Lives They Lived: Fran Hosken

 
Fran Hosken wearing her coil jewelry, c. 1950. Untiled oil on canvas, 1972.

To be a designer in mid-century America was to be part of a club of like-minded individuals, widely literate, socially concerned, and avowedly activist. Trained at places like Cranbrook, the New Bauhaus, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, a young generation of designers shared with their teachers a sense of responsibility and efficacy. Boundaries were fluid, so that furniture or industrial designers also engaged matters of architecture, landscape design, community planning, and urban renewal. As fully-rounded citizens, designers were above all cultural participants, with a level of commitment and dedication we today can only acknowledge and admire.

Franziskas Porges Hosken (1918-2006) was born into a prominent Jewish family in Vienna and immigrated to the United States in 1938. She graduated from Smith College in 1940 and moved to Boston to study architecture and design. One of the first female students admitted to the Harvard School of Design, she earned her Masters in Architecture in 1944. At Harvard, Fran learned Bauhaus ideas and methods from Gropius and Breuer, and Kepes and Moholy-Nagy. While a graduate student, she designed and built a flip-down dining set for her own use, a design that would later be featured in a prestigious international design review. Fran began designing furniture for the market in 1947, and along with her husband, James Hosken, founded Hosken, Inc. later that year. One of her first projects, a stacking stool, became a commercial and critical success. More acclaim would follow. Over the next few years, their work was published in Furniture Forum, The Everyday Art Quarterly, Arredimento Moderno, House and Garden, and The New York Times. It was distributed by Knoll, Raymor, and Macy’s, and was shown at the Chicago Merchandise Mart (including a MOMA Good Design selection in 1951) and the Milan Triennale. Despite this promising start, the business foundered in 1951 when Fran had her first child and a deal for a factory space fell through.

Prototype case piece, c. 1948; from the collection of Fran Hosken.

Writing about her own career for a retrospective at the Lin-Weinberg Gallery in 2001, Fran noted that “Hosken, Inc. was a good idea; the time was right, but we had no capital and no investors to back us up and too little business experience.” She went on to observe:

“Now some 50 years later the very concept of what was called ‘modern’ by a new generation of architects has vanished especially in housing and furniture. The great wave of enthusiasm for ‘new design,’ starting with a new social concept of housing and ‘form follows function’…is gone and has vanished, which I deeply regret. The design and social ideas which I still believe in and which I then thought would sustain the production of simple, demountable, and affordable new furniture…for young families are dead and gone.”

Sketches for unit cases, c. 1948.

Fortunately for posterity, Fran was anything but a pessimist, and with the closing of one door, many other doors opened. During a long and varied career, Fran defied conventions and forged a path of her own choosing. She was a pioneering architectural photographer and archivist (the bulk of her collection is now at Texas A&M University). She was a journalist and teacher on matters of design and architecture. She published books about urban planning, notably The Language of Cities (1968). She traveled extensively, particularly to Africa and Afghanistan, and gained first-hand knowledge about women’s issues in Third World countries. Not one to be limited in her own options, she became active in feminist causes beginning in the 1970’s, serving on the boards of numerous organizations, and founding WIN, the Women’s International Network, a pre-internet means of connecting women and issues globally. She published and distributed a feminist newsletter out of her own house until well into her eighties. And she took up painting in her fifties, becoming a fairly accomplished artist.

I came to know and admire Fran while planning an exhibition of designs and design prototypes from her own collection. Fran was flattered by the belated attention to this part of her career, but it quickly became apparent that the furniture and jewelry that so interested me was but a footnote to Fran. Fran wrote me in April 2001 that she would try to attend the opening of her exhibition–we were providing transportation and accommodations–if she finished publishing the current edition of WIN NEWS in time. This was humbling to me, but demonstrated Fran’s focus and fierce dedication to issues that mattered to her. As her daughter-in-law eulogized, “She felt that unless you were doing something for the world, you were useless.” With Fran’s passing in 2006, the world of design–and the world at large–lost a passionate and tireless advocate.

Serving cart, c. 1949.