Franić was born in Zagreb, studied and now teaches at the city's faculty of architecture, and belongs to the generation of Croatian architects whose careers began in the wake of the war of the early 1990s, when public commissions restarted after a decade of almost none. His reputation rests on one building. In 1998 the City of Zagreb and the Ministry of Culture decided to move the Museum of Contemporary Art out of a cramped palace in the upper town into a purpose-built home in Novi Zagreb; Franić's entry won a competition of eighty-five submissions. He worked on it for eleven years through repeated delays and a budget that more than doubled. He also designed the Kocka mora monument at Dubrovnik, erected in 2007 and removed in 2020, and holds the Viktor Kovačić Award.
