Art Deco in the United States
The Art Deco style, which originated in France just before World War I, had an important impact on architecture and design in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. The most notable examples are the skyscrapers of New York City, including the Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, and Rockefeller Center. It combined modern aesthetics, fine craftsmanship, and expensive materials, and became the symbol of luxury and modernity. While rarely used in residences, it was frequently used for office buildings, government buildings, train stations, movie theaters, diners and department stores. It also was frequently used in furniture, and in the design of automobiles, ocean liners, and everyday objects such as toasters and radio sets.
In the late 1930s, during the Great Depression, it featured prominently in the architecture of the immense public works projects sponsored by the Works Progress Administration and the Public Works Administration, such as the Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam. The style competed throughout the period with the modernist architecture, and came to an abrupt end in 1939 with the beginning of World War II. The style was rediscovered in the 1960s, and many of the original buildings have been restored and are now historical landmarks.
Background
American Art Deco has roots in the style moderne popularized at the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, Paris, from which the name Art Deco would be drawn retroactively. The United States did not officially participate, but Americans—including New York City architect Irwin Chanin and others—visited the exposition, and the government sent a delegation to the expo. Their resulting reports helped spread the style to America. Other influences included German expressionism, the Austrian Secession, Art Nouveau, Cubism, and the ornament of African and Central and South American cultures.Architecture
American Art Deco architecture took different forms in different regions of the country, influenced by the local tastes, cultural influences, or laws. In the 1920s, the style was often referred to as the "vertical style", referring to the new look of skyscrapers appearing in America's cities. In the 1930s and 40s, more horizontal, streamlined or "moderne" buildings became popular. Government buildings commissioned by the Works Progress Administration, with their fusion of moderne and classical elements, are called "WPA Moderne" or "Modern classic".Skyscrapers
The Art Deco style was born in Paris, when in 1925 designers including Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann, Jean Dunand, and Pierre Chareau exhibited their showpieces. The first skyscrapers had been built in Chicago in the 1880s in a commercial style using the latest construction technology. The architectural style is today known as Chicago school. In the 1920s, New York City architects used the new Art Deco style to build the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building.William van Alen, who had designed the Chrysler Building, and the architects who had designed the Empire State Building, William F. Lamb, Arthur Loomis Harmon, and Richmond Shreve, became figureheads in the Art Deco movement which remained popular until the outbreak of World War II. Art deco is decorative, ornate, and expensive, but noted for patterns that are geometric, symmetric, repetitious, and streamlined. The decoration of the interior and exterior of the New York City skyscrapers was classic Art Deco, with geometric shapes and zigzag patterns. The Chrysler Building constructed between 1928 and 1930 updated the traditional gargoyles on Gothic cathedrals with sculptures on the building corners in the shape of Chrysler radiator ornaments. Another major landmark of the style was the RCA Victor Building, now the General Electric Building, by John Walter Cross. It features a highly ornamental crown with geometric spires and lightning bolts of stone. The exterior featured bas-relief sculptures by Leo Friedlander and Lee Lawrie, and a mosaic by Barry Faulkner that required more than a million pieces of enamel and glass.
While the skyscraper Art Deco style was mostly used for corporate office buildings, it also became popular for government buildings, since all city offices could be contained in one building on a minimal amount of land. The city halls of Los Angeles, California and Buffalo, New York were built in the style, and the new state capital building in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Movie theaters
Another important genre of Art Deco buildings is the movie theater. The Art Deco period coincided with the birth of the talking motion picture, and the age of enormous and lavishly decorated movie theaters. Many of these movie theaters still survive, though many have been divided in the interior into smaller screening halls.Among the most famous examples are the Paramount Theatre in Oakland, California, which had a four-story high grand lobby, entered through twenty-seven doors, and could seat 3,746 people.
Radio City Music Hall, located within the skyscraper complex of Rockefeller Center in New York City, was originally a theater for stage shows when it opened in 1932, but it quickly changed to the largest movie theater in the United States. It seats more than five thousand people, and still features a stage show of dancers.
In the 1930s, the streamline style appeared in movie theaters in smaller cities. The movie theater in Normal, Illinois is a classic surviving example.
Department stores and office buildings
Following the lead of the skyscrapers of New York City, smaller in scale but no less ambitious in design, Art Deco office buildings and department stores appeared in cities across the United States. They were rarely built by banks, which wanted to appear conservative, but were often built by retail chains, public utilities, automobile companies and technology companies, which wanted to express modernity and progress. Syracuse, New York is home to the Niagara Mohawk Building, in Syracuse, New York, completed in 1932. was originally the home of the nation's largest electricity supplier. The facade, by the firm of Bley and Lyman, was designed to express the power and modernity of electricity; it features a statue called "The Spirit of Light" 8.5 meters high, made of stainless steel, as the central element of the facade. The Guardian Building, originally the Union Trust Building, is a rare example of a bank or financial institution using Art Deco. Its interior decoration was so elaborate that it became known as the "Cathedral of Commerce".The San Francisco architect Timothy L. Pflueger best known for the Paramount Theatre in Oakland, California, was another proponent of lavish Art Deco interiors and facades on office buildings. The interior of his downtown San Francisco office building, 450 Sutter Street, opened in 1929, was entirely covered with hieroglyphic-like designs and ornament, resembling a giant tapestry.
The Streamline style
Streamline Moderne was a variety of Art Deco which emerged during the mid-1930s. The architectural style was more sober and less decorative than earlier Art Deco buildings, more in tune with the somber mood of the Great Depression. Buildings in the style often resembled land-bound ships, with rounded corners, long horizontal lines, iron railings, and sometimes nautical features. Notable examples include the San Francisco Maritime Museum, originally built as a public bath house next to the beach, and the Pan-Pacific Auditorium in Los Angeles, built in 1935 and closed in 1978. It was declared a historic landmark, but it was destroyed by a fire in 1989.The style of decoration and industrial design was influenced by modern aerodynamic principles developed for aviation and ballistics to reduce air friction at high velocities. The bullet shapes were applied by designers to cars, trains, ships, and even objects not intended to move, such as refrigerators, gas pumps, and buildings. One of the first production vehicles in this style was the Chrysler Airflow of 1933. It was unsuccessful commercially, but the beauty and functionality of its design set a precedent; streamline moderne meant modernity. It continued to be used in car design well after World War II.
Train stations and airports
Art Deco was often associated with airplanes, trains and airships and was frequently chosen as the style for new transport terminals. The semi-dome of Cincinnati Union Terminal measures wide and high. After the decline of railroad travel, most of the building was converted to other uses, including the Cincinnati Museum Center, though it is still used as an Amtrak station.The Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia Airport, built in 1939, was the first terminal for overseas flights from New York; it served the flying boats of Pan American World Airways which landed in the harbor. It survived destruction, and still contains a notable Art Deco mural called Flight, which was destroyed and then restored in the 1980s.
Union Station in Los Angeles was partially designed by John Parkinson and Donald B. Parkinson who had also designed Los Angeles City Hall and other landmark Los Angeles buildings. The structure combines Art Deco, Mission Revival, and Streamline Moderne style, with architectural details such as eight-pointed stars, and even elements of Dutch Colonial Revival architecture.
Hotels, resorts, and the Miami Beach style
The Art Deco period saw an enormous increase in travel and tourism, by trains, automobiles, and airplanes. Several luxury hotels were built in the new style; the Waldorf-Astoria on Park Avenue in New York City, built in 1929 to replace a beaux-arts style building from the 1890s, was the tallest and largest hotel in the world when it was built.The city of Miami Beach, Florida developed its own particular variant of Art Deco, and the style remained popular there until the late 1940s, well after other American cities. It became a popular tourist destination in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly attracting visitors from the Northeast United States during the winter. A large number of Art Deco hotels were built, which have been grouped together into an historical area, the Miami Beach Architectural District, and preserved, and many have been restored to their original appearance. The district has an area of about one square kilometer, and contains both hotels and secondary residences, all about the same height, none higher than twelve or thirteen stories. Most have classic Art Deco characteristics; clear geometric shapes spread out horizontally; aerodynamic streamline features; and often a central tower breaking the horizontal, topped by a spire or dome. A particular Miami Art Deco feature is the palette of pastel colors, alternating with white stucco. The decoration features herons, sea shells, palm trees and sunrises and sunsets. The neon lighting at night highlights the Art Deco atmosphere.