First published in the collection: Decorative art and subject-spatial environment. Bulletin of MGHPA. Number 3. Part 1 Moscow, 2020 p. 21-31. Courtesy of the author. The heyday of the Art Deco style in the United States came at the turn of the 1920s-1930s. and its formation was influenced by a wide range of sources, both historical and relevant. The most important among them was the so-called. "Style of 1925", embodied in the famous pavilions of the "International Exhibition of Decorative Arts and the Artistic Industry", opened in Paris on April 28, 1925. However, in addition to artistic and tectonic concepts, the style of skyscrapers was also formed thanks to urban planning and legal restrictions.
The New York zoning law of 1916, which limited the newly erected buildings to a stepped silhouette, was decisive for the formation of the style of skyscrapers. [1] In 1922 H. Corbett and H. Ferris released a design for the tower, taking into account his requirements. And from that moment on, neoarchaic, medieval imagery begins to be perceived as an artistically valuable idea. So the zoning law of 1916, indifferent to the style characteristics of a high-rise building, determined the highly artistic effect of tectonic thinning of the towers, formed the neo-Aztec yielding and the neo-Gothic silhouette of American cities.
In the 1920s and 1930s, canyon aesthetics replaced the traditional proportions of streets and buildings with classic cornices. In Chicago, the second center for the development of the new style, in the period from 1927 to 1930. Holabert & Ruth, as well as Graham, Anderson, Probst and White, are building five stepped skyscrapers each in neoarchaic, Mesoamerican Art Deco. Monumental, located opposite each other, they were intended to compete with the achievements of neoclassicism of the 1900-1910s, and among themselves. They could not help but admire, and so the Soviet architects of the 1930s aspired to work. Moreover, Art Deco neoarchaism found another, national source of inspiration in the United States - the brick towers of R. Walker in New York went back to the brilliant aesthetics of the Monument Valley rocks (such, for example, Western Union Building, 1930 and A. T. Tee Long Distance Building, 1932). Stepped and covered with bas-reliefs, the Art Deco towers seemed to be the creations of the Aztecs and Mayans that rose to the sky. [2]
The Art Deco style appeared in the 1910s-1930s as a compositional and plastic alternative to neoclassicism (historicism). Thus, a characteristic feature of the US Art Deco is diminutiveness, flatness of the decor, a sharp large-scale and plastic contrast of rare decorative accents and the grandiose, austerely resolved main part of the tower. Like the works of Louis Sullivan, the entrance portals of skyscrapers were designed luxuriously, but in a chamber. Art Deco masters did not enlarge the archaic motives, such was the image of the grandiose, "inhabited" ancient pyramid and the limit of the scale of its embodiment. The Art Deco bas-reliefs created at great heights were radically different from the plastic splendor of historicism. These were deliberately flattened, miniature details that seemed to have fallen from the museum to the street without changing their size.
Art Deco plastic was extremely diverse - it could be either pointed, geometric, or deliberately rounded, "swollen" or aerodynamic, created in the aesthetics of the so-called. streamline. Rejecting the Greco-Roman canon, Art Deco allowed the authors to show their imagination and erudition. So, for example, a special softened interpretation of the form, which goes back to the plasticity of Buddhist and ancient Egyptian sculpture, is coming into vogue. Sharpening, geometrization of silhouettes and drawing of details became another, opposite fashion of the 1920-1930s. It is no coincidence that during the years of its creation, the style of the 1920s-1930s received the names "zigzag-modern", "jazz-modern" and the like, emphasizing the Cubist basis of Art Deco. Geometry, conventionality becomes the characteristic difference between Art Deco and neoclassicism, as obvious as the differences between the sculptural canon of Ancient Greece and the bas-reliefs of Mesoamerica. [3]
Thus, the decorativeness of skyscrapers could take the form of geometrization of historicism (American Radiator Building) and plastic fantasy (General Electric Building), authentic archaization or ultimate, abstract asceticism. Skyscrapers could be decorated with geometrical, neoarchaic (Inter Continental Hotel), fantasy details, or they could be completely devoid of them. And, nevertheless, they appear as an integral, recognizable style. The plasticity of these towers could go back both to the ideas of the avant-garde, innovations of the 1910s and the pavilions of the 1925 exhibition, as well as to the harsh monuments of the distant past. However, it was the pyramids of ancient civilizations that formed both the flattening of the bas-reliefs and the sloping silhouette of the Art Deco towers. Such was the plastic and compositional neoarchaism of America's Art Deco.
For the first time, the combination of flattened bas-reliefs and a stepped silhouette, characteristic of Art Deco, will be carried out in New York by the architect R. Walker. The Barclay-Vezier Building (from 1923) was the first Art Deco skyscraper launched before the 1925 exhibition. [4] A wide range of stylistic origins is evident in its architecture - this is the aesthetics of a sloping neo-Aztec silhouette, and a complex, in the spirit of cubism, composition, as well as rare reliefs, intricately drawn in the spirit of L. Sullivan, dating back to the Middle East, Romanesque and Celtic heritage. The same will be the high-rise buildings at the turn of the 1920s-1930s.
However, what was the role in the formation of the style of skyscrapers at the 1925 International Exhibition of Decorative Arts and Art Industry in Paris?
The exhibition in Paris, originally planned for 1914 and held in 1925 after a long construction pause, sought to become a revival of the pre-war luxury of architecture, and collected all the innovations of the first quarter of the twentieth century. Its pavilions, as later the skyscrapers of America, were designed in the spirit of orientalism and neoarchaic - a sloping silhouette, flattened fantasy-geometrized reliefs, contrasting decorative accents and an ascetic background. Such were the French pavilions "Studio Louvre" and "Primavera", "Pomont" and "Metriz", shopping arcades on the Pont Alexandre III. And one of the first examples of the "style of 1925" imported into the United States was the exquisite metal grilles of the famous Edgar Brandt, a participant in the Paris exhibition. Already in 1925, they decorated the Madison Belmont Building in New York. The 1925 exhibition in Paris "gave a name" to the style of the 1920s and 1930s and became its advertisement, but it could not single-handedly define the aesthetics of skyscrapers. [five]
Art Deco architecture at the 1925 Paris Exhibition and American architecture at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s had common origins that fueled both phenomena. The missing intermediate stage between the isolated works of L. Sullivan and F. L. Wright in the 1890-1900s, and Dutch architecture at the turn of the 1910-1920s became a massive dissemination of the new style. It was in Amsterdam, for the first time after the First World War and Wright's works of the 1900s, that examples of fantasy-geometrized decor appeared, and this experiment was massive, convincing. Moreover, these were not temporary structures created only for the sake of the exhibition, but the urban environment. [6] Dutch architects were the first to perceive the innovative potential of Wright's style and began to develop it, and in the late 1920s the creators of American Art Deco will follow their path. So created at the intersection of lines running from Chicago (from Sullivan and Wright), Paris and Amsterdam, American Art Deco has become an era of mass application and consolidation of previously created solutions.
The era of the emergence of those trends that will shape Art Deco are still the 1890-1900s. The style lines that intersect at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s date back to the early Art Deco era, and for several decades they will pulsate, compete and shape world fashion. In 1893, Wright left Sullivan's workshop, and this divergence of the two geniuses would form two channels along which American Art Deco would later develop. The last decade of the 19th century was for Louis Sullivan a period of prosperity, the pinnacle of his career. Then, in the 1890s, he actively worked with fantasy, flat decor, while Wright invented his own geometrized architecture.
Wright's monumental early Art Deco masterpiece was the Unity Temple in Oak Park, adorned with fancy geometric décor (1906). [7] And in its architecture, it is obvious and passion for Japanese culture (especially in the interior), and the master's discovery of new stylistic techniques. [8] The magical form of this church with incredible force "hits" in two directions, it predicts both the neoarchaism of Art Deco and the abstraction of the avant-garde. And it is precisely this duality that will be characteristic of the style of skyscrapers.
The 1910-1920s became an era of exchange of architectural innovations for Europe and the United States, and after the 1925 exhibition in Paris, the fashion for a new style, Art Deco will take over the cities of America. However, as early as 1910, a two-volume edition of F. L. Wright (the so-called portfolio of E. Wasmut). It had a significant impact on the development of both avant-garde and art deco in Europe. [9] The Unity Temple's response was the buildings of the Synagogue (G. Elte, 1927) and the Jerusalem Church (FB Jantsen, 1929), built in Amsterdam and repeating its forms. The lobby of the Sokolniki metro station in Moscow (1935), designed by the contours of cornices and frames, as well as plinths with characteristic vases, became a rare approximation to the style of the Chicago master and the streamline in the USSR. [ten]
The work of Frank Lloyd Wright of the 1900-1920s appears as a gradual movement from the "prairie style" to the concept of "textile blocks". And the most important source of inspiration for the master during these years is the legacy of the Aztecs and Mayans. [11] The influence of archaic, Mesoamerican architecture on Wright's style was indirect but significant. It wasn't stylization. However, monumental stepped foundations, and double horizontal rods, frames ("prairie houses", Robie House), and belts of flattened reliefs and patterns (Winslow's house, Midway Gardens, Herman's warehouses), and even flat roofs (Unity Temple) - all this was at the same time a rethinking of the images of ancient, Mesoamerican architecture, first of all, the temples of Uxmal, and a diverse, talented stylistic innovation.
At the turn of the 1910-1920s, Wright began working in Japan and Los Angeles, where he built a magnificent series of private villas and mansions. Built in the architecture of the so-called. "Textile blocks", they embodied a paradoxical and expressive synthesis of neoarchaic and technocratic motives. [12] Thus, the evolution of F. L. Wright in the 1910s and 20s consisted of complicating architectural decoration and approaching the Art Deco aesthetics. [thirteen]
In 1924, Wright himself shows how you can turn the style of his mansions into skyscrapers: for Chicago, he creates the magnificent National Life Insurance Building. Its concession was dictated by the law on zoning, and only the method of plane geometrized relief was, as it seems, really neoarchaic, Mesoamerican. However, the work with decorative inserts (patterns, "textures") finds another source in the USA - the fantastical style of Louis Sullivan will become a harbinger of flat Art Deco bas-reliefs.
In his works, Sullivan, back in the 1890s, proposed the theme of a flattened fantasy bas-relief as a decoration for an interwindow medallion and an entrance portal. [14] These were the buildings of the master in St. Louis (1891), Chicago (1893), Buffalo (1894), New York (1899), etc. Working with the facades of multi-storey office buildings, it was Sullivan who began to use the contrast of decorative accents and austerity, impost and flattened relief, and so will the Art Deco skyscrapers. Their decorative palette included neoarchaic motives and fantasy - geometric, technocratic, like Wright's, and floral, orientalistic, like Sullivan's. However, both masters relied on their talent as a draftsman, invention, and archaic, orientalist heritage. And it is precisely this duality of decoration, work at the intersection of stylization and innovation, that was transferred in the 1920s and 1930s from Sullivan and Wright to the style of skyscrapers.
Art Deco skyscrapers were created, one might say, in the "style of the 1925 exhibition", but their details make a distinct impression of being drawn by themselves, with talent. Behind them one can feel a powerful culture, a massive experiment, which already gives out only stylistically accurate solutions. The style of the exhibition was perceived through the prism of its own heritage. And if for the Paris of the interwar era, the "style of 1925" was an exception, then in the United States it was distinctly national, having received its most striking embodiment here. Art Deco skyscrapers became for the United States a kind of "revival" of its own archaic, the Aztec and Mayan pyramids, a dialogue with the pioneers of the new style - Sullivan and Wright, and that is why the "style of 1925" gained such wide popularity in American cities.
Literature
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[1] A landmark in New York architecture was the construction in 1915 of the Equitable Building, a record-setting office space. Already in 1916, a law on zoning will be adopted, which, as P. P. Zuev, allowed the buildings to be as high as desired, starting from the section of the tower equal to a quarter of the area of the site, and demanded an indentation, starting from a mark of 45-60 m, that is, one and a half the width of the street. Subsequently, similar zoning laws were issued in other cities in the United States. [4, p. 6]
[2] The Art Deco era was aware of its origins, so the "Mayan Temple" pavilion, built for the World Exhibition "Age of Progress" in Chicago (1933), was a response to the "Angkor" pavilion at the International Colonial Exhibition in Paris (1931). One of the first examples of this interest was the "Temple of the Aztecs" pavilion at the World's Fair in Chicago (1893).
[3] As P. Baer points out, the revolution in Mexico in 1910 contributed to the intensive study of the monuments of pre-Columbian America, their style turned out to be not only amazing, but new - as they say, “the Indians were the first cubists”. [11, p. 16]
[4] As noted by K. Holliday, the flat reliefs of the Barclay-Vezier building were made even before the exhibition in 1925. R. Walker himself pointed to Roman antiquity and the works of L. Sullivan as sources. [14, p. 50]
[5] As indicated by T. G. Malinin, the term "Art Deco" arose in 1966 on the wave of interest in the art of the interwar period and in connection with the exposition dedicated to the 40th anniversary of the exhibition in Paris (Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes). The very same abbreviation "Art Deco" (Arts Deco) was used for the first time in the articles of Le Corbusier in the 1920s, at first in an ironic, critical sense. [5, p. 27; 8, p. 206]
[6] For more details, see the article by the author [1, pp. 78-83]
[7] In the 1910s, Wright created a series of projects close to Art Deco, including the ribbed Call Building for San Francisco (1912), the projects of the Carnegie Library in Ottawa (1913), and the Aline Barnsdel Theater (1918) and Merchandising Building (1922) in Los Angeles, etc. The Larkin Building in Buffalo (1904, not preserved), Bock House in Milwaukee (1916) and Hollyhock House in Los Angeles (1919-1922) were implemented in the style of early Art Deco.
[8] For the first time with Japanese culture, F. L. Wright (1867-1959) meets at the World's Fair in Chicago (1893). In 1905, Wright embarks on a trip to Japan (the first of a series) and begins collecting Japanese prints. In Tokyo, he designs the Imperial Hotel (1919-1923, not preserved) and the villa of T. Yamamura (1918-1924) in Tokyo. And it is precisely from Japanese architecture that Wright seems to perceive both the aesthetics of strongly extended cornices and roof slopes that form the image and silhouette of the "prairie houses", and the color solutions of interiors, for example, in Unity Temple and Robie House.
[9] Wright's influence is also clearly perceptible in the iconic example of the European avant-garde - the building of the town hall in Hilversum (V. Dudok, 1928), which embodied a kind of enlarged image of Robie House (1908). The influence of Wright's style is also noticeable in the works of O. Perret, the stained-glass windows of the Roby House are recognizable in the interior of the Church of Notre Dame de Rency (1922), the heavily rendered, simplified cornice of the Unity Temple church "completes" the facade of the theater on the Champs Elysees (1913).
[10] Streamline is considered to be one of the trends of the Art Deco era. And among its rare domestic examples, researchers include the building of the Danilovsky department store built in Moscow (G. K. Oltarzhevsky, 1936). This appears to have been a response to the Moss House in Berlin (E. Mendelssohn, 1923). The building of the People's Commissariat for Land was also decided by the horizontals of the cornices and frames (A. V. Shchusev, 1933). Thus, in architecture, the first examples of ribbed style and streamline appear before similar forms in automotive design. For more details on the style techniques of the streamline architecture, see [2, p. 29; 6, p. 389]
[11] The legacy of the Aztecs and Maya was also available to Wright according to the graphic artist F. Caserwood, who in the 1840s first explored and sketched the ruins of the temples of pre-Columbian America, and is known from his own impressions - from the "Aztec temple" at the 1893 World Exhibition in Chicago (where the workshop Sullivana erected the "Transport" pavilion) and from a special exhibition with models and photographs of Mayan temples at the Panama-California Exhibition in San Diego, which the master visited in 1915.
[12] For the first time, Wright worked with "textile blocks" back in the 1910s, so the decisions were made - Midway Gardens (Chicago, 1914, not preserved) and A. Herman's warehouse (Richland Center, 1915). In Los Angeles, in this style, Wright implements a series of mansions - Storer House (1923), Millard House (1923), Freeman House (1923) and Ennis House (1924). Wright's masterpiece was the Hollyhock House (1919-22). Named after the Hollyhock flower, it was adorned with a variety of geometrized décor, both plant-like and technocratic.
[13] Let us explain that in the 1900-1910s, Wright's works were really ahead of their time - both in architectural graphics, and in plastic and composition of volumes. However, in the late 1920s, when Art Deco architecture reached its peak, Wright was not in demand. Moreover, while in the works of the master there was a certain convergence of the fantasy-geometrized plastics of his mansions with the frank neoarchaic, Mesoamerican stylization, the emergence of the avant-garde aesthetics was already underway in Europe and the USSR. And at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s, Wright's architecture, paradoxically, was no longer relevant either in the capitals erected in the classics - Washington and Moscow, or in the creative laboratories of VKHUTEMAS and Bauhaus.
[14] Wright inherited from Sullivan thinking in flattened reliefs, patterns, and heavily extended rectangular cornices (as in the Unity Temple). The distinction of the Art Deco era of the 1920s and 1930s was the completion of buildings not with cornices, but with flattened profiles and details, attics and neoarchaic ledges.
