A glamorous modern style of the interwar years: stepped, setback masses, strong verticals, geometric ornament of zigzags, sunbursts and chevrons, and luxurious materials: the style of the skyscraper, the cinema and the ocean liner.
The name comes from the Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes held in Paris in 1925, though it was only applied in the 1960s. Art Deco borrowed from many sources at once: the geometry of Cubism, the stepped forms of Mesoamerican and Egyptian architecture (Tutankhamun’s tomb was opened in 1922), the machine, and the stylised ornament of the Vienna Secession. It combined them into a decorative modernism for department stores, cinemas, hotels, liners and office towers.
In New York the style met the zoning resolution of 1916, which required tall buildings to step back from the street behind sloping planes, while allowing a tower of unlimited height on a quarter of the lot. Hugh Ferriss’s drawings of these envelopes as stepped mountains inspired architects to treat the law as sculpture. The result was the ziggurat skyline: the Barclay–Vesey Building (1923–27), the Chanin, the Chrysler Building (1928–30) with its stainless-steel crown of sunbursts, the Empire State Building (1930–31), and the ensemble of Rockefeller Center (1930–39).
Deco ornament is geometric rather than naturalistic: zigzags, chevrons, sunbursts, fluted bands and stylised figures, executed in terracotta, bronze, nickel, coloured glass, lacquer and exotic woods. Vertical piers and recessed spandrels emphasise height, as in Sullivan’s towers, but the crowns become fantastic. In the 1930s, streamlining (rounded corners, horizontal speed lines, porthole windows) produced the Streamline Moderne of Miami Beach hotels and bus stations.
The Depression and the Second World War ended the style, and the modernists dismissed it as decoration. Its revival in taste since the 1970s has led to the protection of whole districts, such as Miami Beach and the town of Napier in New Zealand, rebuilt in Deco after an earthquake in 1931.