The Strange Return of Art Deco in America

Source: The Strange Return of Art Deco in America, Stewart Hicks, 14:06, uploaded 2023-12-14, Watch Later position 1036.

The Radiator Building and the Rose Hill Tower make a useful pair. The first opened in 1924. The second arrives roughly a century later, along with new towers such as 180 East 88th Street, 45 Broad Street, the Brooklyn Tower, and One Bennett Park in Chicago. Stewart Hicks asks why a style associated with the wealth and technology of the 1920s has returned as a language for new luxury housing.

A style built from the promise of modernity

Art Deco emerges in the aftermath of the First World War, when social life and technology are changing quickly. Hicks describes it as a style that joins luxury to modernity. Its sources include the geometric forms of Cubism, the machine aesthetic of Futurism, and motifs drawn from African, Egyptian, and Asian art. It gives the period a way to make industrial progress look sophisticated and desirable.

The style travels easily because its visual rules work across many materials and uses. Rounded edges, zigzags, and chevrons give surfaces a clear geometry. Gold, ivory, jade, chrome, and glass bring together luxury and industry. Art Deco therefore reaches furniture, fashion, jewellery, cars, and graphic design as well as architecture.

Hicks places the style’s weight in its buildings. The Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building combine towering forms, elaborate ornament, and an industrial steel structure. Their mass remains visible from the street. Hicks feels that modernist glass towers can almost disappear into the sky, whilst Art Deco buildings stay grounded through their stepped forms and solid surfaces.

The building boom of the 1920s and 1930s spreads this language through the United States. Chicago supplies the Board of Trade and the Carbide and Carbon Building, whose green and gold exterior was designed to resemble a champagne glass. Hicks uses the example to show how Art Deco could turn a corporate building into a public image of wealth and ceremony.

Chris Hytha and the work hidden in a façade

To understand how people look at Art Deco now, Hicks speaks with Chris Hytha, whose book documents the tops of Art Deco skyscrapers across the country. Hytha uses a drone to photograph each floor from above and stitches the images together into flattened, orthographic elevations. The method removes the changing perspective of a street view and makes the repeated decisions across a whole façade visible.

Hytha also builds a model of Chicago’s Carbide and Carbon Building. He says that the project began when he kept looking at a large print of the building and realised how he might assemble its upper structure. He then cut basswood sticks for a month. The model makes the building’s intricate construction legible through the time it takes to reproduce it. Hytha starts thinking about the draftsmen who worked at large drawing tables a century earlier, since their drawings still shape the work of someone who studies the building today.

The stepped tower and its formal work

The Radiator Building and Rose Hill share the stepped profile that Hicks calls a ziggurat because it recalls the pyramid-like structures of ancient Mesopotamia. Their resemblance makes the newer building look as though Hugh Ferriss had drawn it, with the tower standing in dramatic light as a heroic object.

The stepped form first answers a practical problem. Steel construction allows buildings to rise higher, whilst setbacks keep the upper floors smaller than the base. A smaller upper floor catches less wind and allows more light to reach the streets and the spaces around the tower. In New York, the form also works with the 1916 zoning resolution, which limits the canyon created by tall buildings that run from one property line to the next. Rose Hill turns some of its setbacks into balconies.

The same arrangement changes how the tower appears. Because the top is smaller, the eye reads it as further away, which gives the building a forced perspective and a clear termination. Vertical stripes continue beyond the horizontal breaks of the setbacks. Floors sit behind these vertical elements, so the façade gives greater visual weight to the upward movement of the tower.

At the base, Art Deco makes the building feel heavy. Small openings and solid surfaces lead towards entrances that appear small beside the scale of the whole structure. The relationship makes a person feel small and lets the building stand apart as a formal object. Symmetry adds to that effect. Both towers can be divided down the middle into matching halves, a device Hicks associates with buildings that want to appear stately and important.

Craft completes the effect through materials, patterns, and ornament that give the façade texture. Chevrons point up and down across the surface. Gold adds a final layer of display. The style therefore carries several kinds of work at once: the setbacks manage wind and light, the vertical elements extend the building’s apparent height, and the ornament turns construction into a public image.

From corporate monument to luxury residence

Hicks finds the largest change in what these towers are for. The Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, and the Carbide and Carbon Building were office buildings commissioned by individual developers or corporations. Their façades gave banks, companies, and institutions a visible sign of wealth, power, and security. A bank with a polished Art Deco tower could make the money held inside feel safer.

The new towers are developer-led residential buildings. Their apartments and condominiums sell a way of life to wealthy residents. Promotional images place old Art Deco towers behind the new ones and repeat them in glass reflections, so the buyer can associate a private home with the prosperous era that the style still represents. Hicks compares the appeal to the life of Jay Gatsby.

This use of history also explains why the revival can feel convincing. A new building can borrow a local language and fit into a neighbourhood with older Art Deco structures. Hicks enjoys the craft and supports Hytha’s attempt to make less famous buildings across the United States worth looking at. The same craft can serve a narrower commercial purpose when Art Deco becomes a way to market high-end condominiums.

Hicks’s criticism rests on the gap between the style’s public image and the buildings’ social use. Art Deco shows wealth and power with great skill. Its new residential form gives that display to people who can buy into it, whilst the architecture itself offers no special claim to efficiency, inclusion, or better public life. The Chrysler Building stood empty for years after it opened during the Great Depression, which leaves Hicks wary of a new wave of buildings that presents prosperity as an architectural fact.

Limits

This note follows Stewart Hicks’s narration, English captions, description, and the linked material supplied with the video. The video has no chapters or bibliography. Its account of Art Deco’s origins, the relation between the 1916 zoning resolution and the stepped form, and the reasons for the present revival remains an architectural reading from Hicks rather than a fully documented history.

The source gives particular attention to Chris Hytha’s photographs and model, while the full conversation is available separately on Nebula. The description links the project to Hytha’s Highrises book and to Art Deco: Extended Conversation with Chris Hytha. Those links support the identity of the project and the existence of the longer interview. They do not independently establish Hicks’s broader claims about the historical causes or social effects of the revival.

The captions misrecognise several names and phrases, including Chris Hytha, Hugh Ferriss, and the Carbide and Carbon Building. The spellings here follow the context of the source and the linked project pages. The closing comparison between Art Deco 1.0 and the luxury-condo revival is Hicks’s judgement. His suggestion that the earlier style was misguided, and that its return should invite caution, remains an interpretation rather than a prediction about the buildings’ eventual fate.

Further reading / references

• Chris Hytha, Highrises, the book and image project discussed in the video.
• Art Deco: Extended Conversation with Chris Hytha, the longer interview from which the video uses a few excerpts.