A Journey Through American Art Deco: Architecture, Design, and Cinema in the Twenties and Thirties

Organized as a pilgrimage and a kind of travelogue, much in the style of those RKO newsreels of the thirties, A Journey through American Art Deco manages to entertain, inform, and interpret all at the same time. Its style is as arch as its subject matter, but its purpose is serious: to save the remains of Art Deco that are threatened by urban renewal all over the United States. -- Hayden White, University of California and Stanford UniversityBeginning with the dreams of Hollywood and ending in its lobbies and boulevards, A Journey through American Art Deco passes through a series of itineraries that display the most interesting examples of Art Deco, from Chicago to New York, from Denver to Phoenix, from Seattle to Los Angeles and Miami Beach. The two most notable highlights of the journey are New York and Los Angeles, with their long list of Art Deco monuments.At the great Exposition Internationale des Arts Dicoratifs et Industriels Modernes held in Paris in 1925 American designers encountered the new style, then called moderne, which was to become Art Deco. Once in the U.S., European Dico turned into American Deco, utilizing clean, geometric lines and industrial materials such as steel, plastic, and glass, as well as highly polished wood to create furniture; to adorn the interiors of hotel rooms and lobbies, stores, movie theaters, offices, elevators, and transatlantic liners; and to give a characteristic stamp to building exteriors. This new style came to symbolize the country with its combination of art and industry.