in France during the late 20s and the art deco-style that was put on display at that 1925 exhibition starts to shift from the more decorative ornamental designs that we saw at the exhibition to designs that respond progressively more to the machine aesthetic but in America Art Deco really doesn't arrive on our shores until 1925 and it's through our experience of the exhibition in Paris that it actually comes to us when the French government since out sends out invitations to all nations inviting them to show their modern designs at the exhibition America declines it doesn't mean they don't go they do indeed they just don't put anything on exhibition the American government determines that America doesn't have a modern style to put on display but goes to Paris hoping to learn what it is that the French are doing they return the government cultural institutions department stores designers with lots of new ideas and very often great examples of what is being produced in fact cultural institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art here in New York City actually purchase a good deal of what makes up the core of their Art Deco collection directly from that Fair when they return they start to interpret some of these designs and they use a lot of what they've learned in France to inform design in America from 1925 really right up until the Second World War one thing that they miss is that in fact America is already contributing to modern modern design and to the Art Deco style through the architecture that's developed in the first couple of decades in the United States and it's the tall building the skyscraper the excitement of being able to build high and tall that America is really exploring and that Europe is actually looking to as one of the sort of motifs that enter into this modernist February looking for instance at the kind of costumes at the bows arts costume ball in 1931 we can see that the skyscraper was certainly important here in America as well and if we look at the central figure you can see that one of the most important buildings was a Chrysler Building Paul Frankel uses the skyscraper actually as an inspiration for a whole series of pieces of furniture he designs and we can see how the kind of stepped architecture of the early skyscrapers has been integrated into these designs and really kind of glorified it becomes part of the art deco vocabulary in America now Frankel is in fact an immigrant he comes from Austria and if we look at this piece not just for its form but start to think about the kind of geometric quality the way that he's using these broad expanses of a kind of light colored wood veneer that are then outlined with these black lines you can see how he's been influenced by the design of Vienna both the V nerver cotta and what they were doing and the beta Myer from a hundred years earlier so why did these buildings look this way it has to do with a setback law which is established in 1916 the setback law actually allows for more light and air to penetrate down to street level because with the ability to build very tall buildings you could create these dark caverns and that's exactly what was happening developers want to develop more floor space to rent but the city had to say there are limits to that because what they were creating were these kind of really dark awful streets the interesting thing is that once the setback laws are established the developers respond by creating these kind of stepped talks to the building which become an integral part of the way that skyscrapers are seen in the first half of the century and we can see this here in the radiator building by raymond hood now this building has kind of ziggurat talk to it where it's got all these steps that take it back and what hood has done is actually apply gothic motifs to the top of the building and to the base of the building the whole central portion of the building is just treated as one continuous shaft with very little ornament on it it has almost a kind of crown at the top of the building and this was very satisfying visually and aesthetically this approach to designing skyscrapers with reference to historical styles begins to change with the advent of buildings like the Chrysler Building the Chrysler Building takes motifs that are actually much more part of the art deco design world and relate much more to modern times and a kind of forward-looking design vocabulary and apply them to architecture so when we're looking for instance at the top of the Chrysler Building we can see this like repeated arch motif that then has these triangular windows in it that create a kind of starburst it has a very kind of active quality to it energy energizing and this is one of the things that we see over and over again in art deco we saw it in France we see it even more in American Art Deco now the Chrysler Building is finished in 1931 and it's kind of an interesting story how it gets to look this way originally the developers had five five different versions of the way this building could be completed but they were waiting for a tenant for the building when Chrysler signs on to take over the building the building is then finished to match Chrysler's corporate identity and because of that elements of the car the automobile kind of the heart of America are incorporated into architecture a wonderful marriage of two really important elements of modern life tall buildings and fast cars so as we move down the building we come to a level where the where there are these kind of gargoyle like figures and in fact these gargoyle like figures are hood ornaments from Chrysler cars and you can see them very much enlarged appearing out over the city as we move a little further down the building we encounter another one of those hood ornaments and this one can actually be seen from the street very much about speed and power and just next to that hood ornament running as a frieze around the building at that floor we see a series of circles and if you look at this a little more closely you can see that these are tires with hubcaps in the center they've just been abstracted and then a little bit further down we see this kind of strong kind of zigzag quality again energy movement even the tires look as if they're moving they've got kind of they've got speed lines I'm coming along the side or speed whiskers they really have this sense of movement this is a big part of what develops as American motifs in in Art Deco look at the entryway to the Chrysler Building and how they're using aluminum that modern metal and they're creating all kinds of zigzags in the metal and sharp points again very much filled with energy on entering the building we see the use of very fine materials much like France America often uses very fine materials in their major lobby areas but not like France they very often mix this with lesser metals or or woods that are not nearly as exotic as the kinds of woods that were being used in France and this is kind of for two reasons one is that the Great Depression has already had 1929 completely changes the economic situation in the whole world all of that wonderful luxury design that's being produced in Paris really is no longer affordable by most people the other thing is that in America there's not the same kind of desire to have this kind of exclusive luxury goods market American design is much more about the middle-class about offering luxury but a kind of luxury that's attainable not a luxury that's completely out of this world so American Art Deco tends to even when it follows French Art Deco I'm kind of tamp it down a little bit and so we see for instance here in this Lobby very fine materials being used on the wall extraordinary marble we see this kind of experimental lighting that's actually built into the architecture so it's indirect it's diffused and coming around these kind of sculptural lighting fixtures that are embedded in the column and above the elevator Bank there and when we get a little bit closer to the ceiling we can see this extraordinary mural on the ceiling now a mural doesn't doesn't have that kind of luxury quality to it although it's it's very much like some of the interiors we say in France it doesn't it's not an exotic material we see lots of murals in the United States in the Art Deco style now looking here at this elevator banks you can see how really extraordinary design can can get in America it certainly isn't without lots of ornament and here we've got this motif that's kind of like a palm or maybe it derived from Egyptian motif remember Tutankhamun's tomb is is uncovered in 1925 so there's a lot of excitement about that and we can see the use of a variety of woods set into nickel so the elevator banks are also I'm quite extraordinary if you go into any Art Deco building that has its original elevators you're probably going to find really gorgeous elevator banks they they tend to be quite wonderful another one of the important Art Deco buildings in New York City during this time is Rockefeller Center in Rockefeller Center was a very large project that mr. Rockefeller was really deeply involved with during the 1920s the plan was for large area in Manhattan it would be a city within a city it would actually contain business offices it would have retail businesses it would have entertainment and culture and it would even have some housing it doesn't today have any housing but they did succeed in bringing cultural and business institutions together within this complex now what Rockefeller wanted to do was to create a place that a person could spend their entire day in and to that end the buildings are designed so that although there are a few very tall buildings sunlight and air can reach most of the outdoor areas and plazas for the better part of the day also when you're looking at this from above you can see that there are a lot of gardens on the tops of these roofs they still are there this was another thing that he planned into it the idea of outdoor space accessible from some of the offices well in 1929 this complex was not completed and when the crash hits the investors pull out he also had signed a contract with the New York Opera and they were going to move in there they pull out as well because it's just not going to work they don't see any ability to do this economically but Rockefeller does Rockefeller puts his own money into this project because he believes in it so full heartedly it's really fitting that it's called Rockefeller Plaza it really was his dream and he goes ahead and he builds it he builds it with a very strong Art Deco style to it it has this wonderful soaring quality it becomes an icon of New York in the 1930s and finally he gets a tenant to come into the theater area that had been planned so instead of an opera they get RCA a company that was all about radio and radio broadcasting this is a very kind of democratic cultural medium it's it's one where all you needed was a radio you turn it on and you could tune into musical performances and all kinds of entertainment it was a big part of people's lives in America in the 1930s and having this wonderful venue in New York City meant that they could open their doors to people to come into the theater and actually be part of live radio broadcasts but also to take part in the showing of movies and all kinds of live stage performances this theater wasn't meant to be an exclusive theater it was meant to be a theater that really opened its doors to the public to those people who listen to them on radio donald deskey does a wonderful job of taking the grandeur and elegance of french art deco and translating it for an American audience in the grand foyer we see this sweeping staircase that wraps around one end of this of this really large grand space and then continues in this kind of undulating form all around the mezzanine at the top of the stairs we see this triple height mural that really looks a lot like the kinds of things that one would have seen in France it also looks a great deal like what one would have encountered on one of the great steamships that was bringing people back and forth from America to Europe the French steamships had the same kind of really magnificent interiors look at the size of those chandeliers enormous and really really just bringing a kind of splendor to this interior yet the materials that dusky is using are not those of a really exclusive space he's using lots of aluminum where the French might have used crystal and a chandelier he's using glass the carpet and actually all of the textiles and many of the wall finishes are designed by some of America's leading textile and wallpaper designers of the time so he brings in a team to do a lot of the detail in this space and if we take a closer look at some of these details we can see how extraordinary every element of this interior is so the carpet changes throughout Radio City we have here this geom mattress sized or or sort of cubistic and interpretation of the masks from theater and here on the floor in the lower level we have a kind of plaid that's been designed that also has a kind of art deco quality to it the lighting like what we saw at the Chrysler Building is experimental so we've got all different kinds of lighting in in throughout the interior um some of it is this kind of recessed lighting that creates this diffused light and then you can see that he's using materials that are not so extraordinarily expensive like chromed metal and smoked glass in order to create a sense of luxury without going to a tremendous expense in the foreground we also see a kind of modern interpretation of a classical statue now actually the nudity really disturbed people this had been in a more prominent place originally but Americans were a little more prude than the French and they really didn't want to see a naked lady when they entered one of the major rooms in the space going into the theater we see one of the largest auditoriums in America at the time he has a complex sound system and a very complex stage behind those curtains but what the audience encountered was this kind of sunburst that just makes the entire theater glow and he's got those concentric arches but but here he also has these kind of lines these strips that radiate out from it the whole thing is gilt so that it just glows gold and then the lighting is recessed behind each one of those arches in order to kind of accentuate the the overlapping quality and to really give you the sense of really kind of moving into visually moving into the space of the stage when you move around the building and go into some of the more private areas like for instance the lounge s you'll find that each one of them has been addressed in a different way so here for instance were in one of the men's lounges and this would have been used as a smoking room it has a wallpaper that tells the story of tobacco through a series of illustrations and then we have these pieces of furniture now some of these furniture designs look very much like what we might have encountered in Paris right about the same time the difference is that here we're where we see metal in the table and the console for instance what we're seeing is very often cast aluminum and less expensive material we're in France we might have seen a lacquer surface here we're seeing bakelite or black glass and bakelite is a very early form of plastic and then for the pieces of furniture we see very simple bold forms we're not seeing anything exotic we're not seeing any luxury materials here in one of the women's lounges we see a mural on the wall that's an interpretation of Georgia O'Keeffe's work and the mirrors that have been installed are backlit so they're really very simple circular discs of mirror that are then backlit to make them look as if they're kind of glowing or floating on the wall below them are these little shelves I'm also made out of glass so that they are not very expensive but they have this very kind of elegant quality to them and the table in the foreground also the metal is all aluminum so what he's doing what dusky is doing is he's taking some of the elements of the French interiors but he's reinterpreting them in less expensive materials for a much more kind of democratic interpretation of French art deco and also responding to the aesthetics of of the American culture and in fact deskey himself was originally French so he's really I'm kind of perfect for the position of kind of taking those ideas that are going on in France and interpreting them for America where he had made his home for many years at the top of the Radio City Music Hall complex as an apartment that was meant for the manager of the theater and here we see spaces that were meant both for living and maybe even more primarily for receptions and in this room we see a kind of group of furniture that really reflects those ideas that we first saw in France the kind of dark exotic looking woods the use of of a kind of classical inspiration for many of the forms for instance this console table toward the front of the image and the table that sits at the back of the sofa both have very kind of classical elements to them but here they've been interpreted in completely different materials than what we would have seen in France the woods are no longer exotic woods in the metal like much of the furniture through the public areas in the building is also aluminum surfaces that look like lacquer very often our bakelite and the wood that panels the walls is not an exotic wood but a local wood that's been stained to give it this really lovely warm color so although it looks rich and expensive it's actually using less expensive materials but it still has that kind of grand quality that we saw enrolments interiors with very high ceilings the soaring floor-to-ceiling drapes and the surfaces that reflect light and have these rich luxurious tones it's just that all the materials that are being used are slightly less expensive and this really suited an American aesthetic they wanted style but they didn't necessarily want to have all of these luxury finishes now des key as I said was actually very influenced by what was going on in France and and he did travel back and forth to France and we see some of for instance France of the French experimental lighting designs affecting the work that he does and this is a small table lamp that he designs where the light is diffused through the UM frosted glass panels and you can see as well that he applies some of these wonderful kind of jagged motifs that are of a sense of energy and movement to the design of things like unfolding screens and here it has a very kind of luxurious finish with a silver gilt now this was also a moment when a new profession was born and that was the profession of the industrial designer and here we see Raymond Loewy I'm sitting in an exhibition that was part of a show that the Metropolitan Museum put on talking about American design and the this interior is completely designed by Raymond Loewy and he's got on display some of his more successful designs now what is an industrial designer they're neither an engineer nor an interior designer they're kind of a product designer what are they exactly well as a new profession they were sort of finding their own way as well there were lots of new products on the market but many of them had not had their kind of exterior really contemplated no one was really thinking too hard about what they looked like things like refrigerators and pencil sharpeners things that were in a sense truly utilitarian that hadn't been considered in terms of design the industrial designer really takes up that that kind of range of products and starts to change the way that they look now this is happening right after the Great Depression hits it's a moment when companies that produce those kinds of products are really trying to find a way to stay afloat it's hard to sell something like a refrigerator to people when they're having trouble making ends meet and the people who already owned refrigerators were probably not going to buy another one because there hadn't been any great shifts and the efficiency of these products so what was this company going to do well what they realized was that with the help of an industrial designer they could actually make a next generation of products that was more stylish that was appealing aesthetically even though the product at exactly this thing as last year's model this allowed them to claim to have capitalized on those within the market that had enough money and had kind of come over to the idea of something like like a refrigerator and have them buy another one and another one in order to keep up now it's hard to imagine a world where practically no one has a refrigerator and where it's a hard sell to get someone to buy one but in the 1930s most Americans did not have refrigerators in fact most electrical appliances that we think of as being really sort of you know central to the daily function of our lives were not in people's homes so by bringing in somebody like raymond loewy and making the refrigerator a kind of central design object in your house you were able to kind of increase the sales and and also convince people that had not purchased one that it wasn't just about the efficiency of it it was also about having a modern-looking kitchen the success of these kinds of designs brings companies to be interested in having industrial designers work on lots and lots of different products in order to increase sales and so raymond loewy the office actually saw such a broad range of design coming through it that he was sort of seen as a kind of all-powerful designer we see raymond loewy here in this space that reflects a lot of the design ideas that he applies not just to products but also to commercial spaces that he's responsible for designing and one of the kind of central idea is that he applies to a lot of design in the 1930s is the idea of streamlining and streamlining of course originates in airplane design where they're actually putting things into air tunnels and thinking about how to shape the wings or the body of an airplane in order to move through the air in the most effective or efficient way streamlining when applied to objects the don't move like for instance the desks or the window that he's sitting in front of or even the automobile that's displayed in front of Raymond Loewy gives the sense of movement even when the object is is completely stable so of course a car does move but these automobiles weights such an awful lot that changing the way that the the body was shaped had almost no effect on for instance speed or fuel efficiency it was really all about perception the sense that something was dynamic that it was part of the future and we see that in his designs for all of this interior and also for these products so when you look for instance at the front of this car it really looks like it's going to move quickly it's quite appealing and it increased sales tremendously it also increased sales for tickets for trains we see low E and other industrial designers being brought on to modernize these engines in order to create more sales for competing train lines because in the 30s America still had a number of different companies that were running their trains one of the things that we see on the exterior of this train are these three parallel horizontal lines running around the base of the Train these are speed lines or speed whiskers you could see them in for instance a cartoon when someone is running fast they've got the lines behind them here we see them applied to the exterior of the train clearly they're not making a train go faster but the perception that the train is going faster is definitely there and it doesn't stop on the exterior we also see these same kind of ideas being applied to lowey's designs for interior so for instance here we see the kind of streamlining of the sides of the seats we see the horizontal lines running throughout the interior even a kind of ziggurat motif at the top that has that same kind of streamlined quality this train looks like it's going fast even in the interior and again these kinds of design elements helped in ticket sales they made people feel like they were buying in to the modern world and when you haven't got an awful lot to spend and when the future really holds a whole lot more promise than the present something like a streamed line pencil sharpener is actually really appealing it gives you the feeling that you're bringing into your world even in a small way something that's very forward-looking something that holds the promise of a brighter future it also means that you can modernize in little bits and pieces and sometimes that was all a person needed so lots of these products were being bought to go into homes that were otherwise pretty old-fashioned looking but giving the consumer a sense that they were part of the future this really turns around a lot of the market it also lets companies into the secret that if they change their product every year they can increase sales and so we start to see a kind of built in concept of absolute design not just the idea that a product isn't going to physically last that long but then in fact they're already planning for the change that's going to make people want the new design while there doesent designing the current product and loi as I said really put his hand to a very broad range of products so here we see just a portion of his design life we've got trains and we've got automobiles we've got coke dispensers and even the package the Lucky Strike cigarettes package is one of his designs and of course he wasn't alone this field really opens wide and we've got all kinds of people coming in into this world of industrial design Norman Bel Geddes was actually very experimental and was really interested in architectural design he was interested in in areas of engineering and we see that in this futuristic car that he designs at the bottom of this image here this is a model of the car he actually built working models full-scale unfortunately this didn't work it kept falling over it was really not a successful design but the idea that you could design something like this for this future world was something that was really a big part of why industrial designers had such success they were so looking to the future look at the radio design on top you can see even in this completely stable product how the horizontal lines give it a sense of movement the bright solid colors that are embedded in this plastic give it a very kind of cheerful solid quality and he actually had a great deal of success in designing these kinds of portable radios this is a design by Ken Weber another industrial designer he actually focused a lot on interiors and furniture and here we can see those ideas of modernism the tubular steel the functional quality of this piece of furniture it's simple it's relatively light it certainly promises to be a piece of furniture that you could move around but Ken Weber actually uses more tubular steel than is necessary he's almost going to have I'm making this ornamental because he's created this kind of speed lines around the arms of this chair this chair actually has kind of the sense that it's going to move forward look at the way he's created a teardrop shape in those supports and then reinforce that idea of movement with the three lines of chromed tubular steel I'm traveling around that teardrop Russell Wright is an industrial designer who focuses a great deal on tabletop and we see on the right-hand side of the screen a group of pieces that are designed in aluminum and it's actually spun aluminum and that accounts for the fact that they all have this circular spherical shape on the left hand side of the screen we see from the late 30s something that becomes actually more prevalent in design this kind of response to organic design and the idea that these pieces have a kind of almost natural form they fit the human human hand and they have these very kind of natural colors to them and this becomes very popular as we hit the 1940s now American art deco can almost be seen as ending just as we enter the Second World War 1939 probably marks sort of the last high point for American Art Deco and we can see in the World's Fair designs that still reflect an interest for instance the sphere and the tower that become the symbol for this this fair but we also see it in the buildings that are built for the fair and if we look at this map this is this is the whole fair in a park in Queens New York it's laid out with the central area where the sphere is and then all of the different pavilions kind of radiates from out from that but over to the right-hand side of the screen we see this concentration of pavilions that are devoted to the automobile and the automobile industry really takes up kind of the lion's share of of the park and that's because the automobile industry actually was really central to the American economy and it had a lot to do also with the American identity we were a nation of car driving people and we saw ourselves as really being very very forward in automobile design so here we have the Chrysler pavilion and you can see that this pavilion provided all kinds of entertainment for people in their advertising material they show a number of major events kind of taking place within this large circular building really people coming to this fair could spend the whole day I'm just moving through the transportation pavilions Chrysler alone had a movie theater a large arena where one could could see new cars on display and even this going to volcano that that would that would come up from beneath the pavilion creating all kinds of spectacular entertainment not to mention um the cars that were on display outside of the pavilion when we look at the pavilion itself we see a building that's very much in the Art Deco style this this large kind of cylinder of a building with with these towers on either side but it also incorporates some of the ideas that we see coming out of industrial design it's got a very streamlined quality to it and that's no accident the same people that we're designing automobiles and other kinds of products for these these industries were also designing their architecture and so here for instance we see one of the most popular of the exhibitions the Futurama ride and this was designed by Norman Bel Geddes so we've got this group these you can see just how many people were kind of sneaking into the building these great long lines kind of being threaded through into this very futuristic kind of almost frightening looking building and when they got inside they would get on this kind of people mover it was it was a series of benches that were connected together and when they sat you'd sit down on it and like a little train it would take you through the whole exhibition the high point of this exhibition was this kind of diorama of the future that Norman Bel Geddes had made and here we see his vision of the future in about maybe 25 or 30 years we see a city that's made up of skyscrapers and we see all kinds of transportation and in fact one of the things that that was really on display was the kind of future of transportation central to Norman Bel Geddes vision of the future was the way the transportation would change in the coming years and if we kind of focus on the center of this image we can see streets that are at what what we would consider normal street level today that are just for pedestrians and then a lower level of streets that was meant just for automobiles so there's no public transportation built into this it's all about the pride the automobile and a number of heliports that would allow for private helicopters to bring people into these densely populated urban centers the fact that this was such a focus of people's visits to the World's Fair really lets us in on the way that people were thinking about the future the kind of the kind of expectations that they had about the way that things would change as the years past and of course having gone through the Depression the idea of the future being held out as a kind of bright place was one that people really embraced and this is has a lot to do with why modernism when it comes in after the Second World War is so readily accepted