History of Art Deco

Although I'm focusing on American Art Deco, the movement actually started overseas. I love the fact that Art Deco started out so against the status quo and then became such an icon of its time. 

In 1922, The Chicago Tribune needed a new headquarters. To this end, they allowed architects from all around the world to submit designs for consideration. An American called Raymond Hood won the competition, but the community of architects was more intrigued by the Finnish Eliel Saarinen’s design, which incorporated elements of a new and unusual style. When Hood won another competition, he used some of the same ideas, fused with Gothic architecture, to create the America’s first Art Deco skyscraper. Three years after this, in 1925, the Exposition des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels was held in Paris, marking the official beginning of Art Deco.  Although Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover banned official American involvement, believing American architecture was not innovative enough to include in the event, some Americans went anyway and brought ideas back to their compatriots, who adopted the style with a zeal fueled by a desire to prove their creativity to their government.  Soon, Art Deco structures such as William Van Alen’s Chrysler Building, William F. Lamb’s Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center (designed by Raymond Hood, along with Henry Hofmeister and H.W. Corbett), the buildings on Florida’s Ocean Drive, and Robert V. Derrah’s Coca-Cola bottling plant in Los Angeles sprang up across Art Deco’s adopted nation. A deeply cultural genre of architecture, Art Deco helped to inspire America as it was poised to enter the modern age.

Art Deco was a conscious reaction against Art Nouveau, a style commonly used in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While Art Nouveau focused on the curves and other organic shapes of nature, Art Deco emphasized the clean, simple lines of the machine. Art Nouveau was a rejection of the uniformity and materialism of the Machine Age; Art Deco was a celebration of the future it brought. The latter, which was very different from most of the genres preceding it, was a perfect fit for an age that characterized itself by breaking tradition