Art Deco architecture flourished in large cities and small towns throughout America in the 1920s and 1930s. The style is now captured in over 500 color photos of 75 lavish and innovatively designed buildings across the country that have been preserved both outside and in, giving the full scope of this beloved, exciting style.

Explores the tradition of the streamlined design and reveals how it was manifested in the great buildings, furniture, and merchandise of the 1930s.

Filled with color examples of art, architecture, and decorative craft, this volume explores America's contribution to one of the 20th century's most influential artistic movements.

An expansive take on American Art Deco that explores Chicago's pivotal role in developing the architecture, graphic design, and product design that came to define middle-class style in the twentieth century Frank Lloyd Wright’s lost Midway Gardens, the iconic Sunbeam Mixmaster, and Marshall Field’s famed window displays: despite the differences in scale and medium, each belongs to the broad current of an Art Deco style that developed in Chicago in the first half of the twentieth century. This ambitious overview of the city’s architectural, product, industrial, and graphic design between 1910 and 1950 offers a fresh perspective on a style that would come to represent the dominant mode of modernism for the American middle class. Lavishly illustrated with 325 images, the book narrates Art Deco’s evolution in 101 key works, carefully curated and chronologically organized to tell the story of not just a style but a set of sensibilities. Critical essays from leading figures in the field discuss the ways in which Art Deco created an entire visual universe that extended to architecture, advertising, household objects, clothing, and even food design. Through this comprehensive approach to one of the 20th century’s most pervasive modes of expression in America, Art Deco Chicago provides an essential overview of both this influential style and the metropolis that came to embody it.

Art Deco made its formal appearance in Paris at the 1925 L'Exposition Internationale des Arts Dâecoratifs et Industriels Modernes, a showcase for art, architecture, and design that promoted progress, modernity, and the present. The greatest export from this exhibition was a style that has since been recognized as one of the great design movements of the 20th century. Art Deco's growing recognition coincided with the growth of Los Angeles as the entertainment capital. Between the world wars, the city's architecture sprouted characteristic signs of Art Deco: the interplay of vertical and horizontal features, geometric shapes, use of exotic and modern materials, as well as simplified streamlined forms. This volume's collection of images celebrates Los Angeles's Art Deco heritage, showcasing such structures as Bullock's Wilshire, Sunset Tower, the Oviatt Penthouse, the Wiltern and Pantages Theatres, and many more.--From publisher description.

For graphic artists, industrial designers, and anyone with an interest in the evolution of modern advertising icons, product packaging, and marketing principles, this book offers a fascinating glimpse into a formative era of the American commercial arts.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, American manufacturers created a stunning variety of powder compacts reflecting the modern design concepts of what we now call Art Deco. Powder compacts had first appeared in the early 1920s. While these early compacts were largely utilitarian, their embellishments rapidly evolved into miniature works of art. The height of this artistic expression occurred in 1930 and 1931. These compacts were considered jewelry and were sold in jewelry stores and better department stores. The advent of the Great Depression had a devastating effect on the producers of these beautiful compacts. Many manufacturers either went out of business or merged with other companies. The companies that did survive quickly redesigned their products by eliminating the complex case designs and their striking ornamentation. Although compacts of the early or high Art Deco era were produced by any number of American manufacturers, two companies, Elgin American Manufacturing Company of Elgin, Illinois and J. M. Fisher Company of Attleboro, Massachusetts, utilized these modern design concepts for virtually their entire product line during this period.The book includes comprehensive coverage of the Art Deco compacts produced by Elgin American and J. M. Fisher as well as a survey of Art Deco compacts produced by other American manufacturers of this era including Evans Case Company; Girey Company; Marathon Company; Pilcher Manufacturing Company; Richard Hudnut Corporation; Ripley & Gowen Company; Theodore W. Foster & Bros. Co.; Volupte, Inc.; and others. The book includes nearly 1200 color photographs, historical information relating to the emergence of powder compacts and Art Deco design, historical information concerning American compact manufacturers of this era, an extensive bibliography, and other reference materials.

This exploration of Art Deco architectural design embraces many different times and places in its visual and verbal account of the movement's origins, development, and influence.

work on the subject for many years to come." "With over 1,000 illustrations in colour and black-and-white." --Book Jacket.