On a spire raised in secret, a zoning law that drew a skyline, and a style named after it died
Nobody invented art deco. The style that defined the 1920s and 30s issued no manifesto and founded no school, and the name it goes by was already current among dealers when a 28-year-old sale-room correspondent put it on a title page in 1968. Trace its forms to their sources and you leave art behind: the stepped skyscraper was drawn by a light ordinance, the rounded radio by what a resin would consent to be, the lotus by a tomb other people dug up. Modernism was an idea; deco, the verdict runs, was only a look. But where did the look come from?
On October 23, 1929, inside the fire shaft of an unfinished tower on Lexington Avenue, a crew hoisted a steel spire up through the roof and fixed it in place in about ninety minutes. It had arrived in sections and been assembled in secret, inside the building, and the morning after it went up was Black Thursday. Scaffolding hid the crown until the spring. The extra height was given to the press only in November, after the rival tower downtown at 40 Wall Street had topped out, and by then William Van Alen’s Chrysler Building stood 1,046 feet high, the tallest in the world.
The most famous gesture of art deco was made inside a shroud, with no one in the street to see it and no name for it that would last, had anyone looked. The people who made the style called it moderne, when they called it anything. Fifteen months later, at the Society of Beaux-Arts Architects’ ball at the Hotel Astor, under the theme of a Fête Moderne, Van Alen came dressed as his building, with its spire on his head. When the name hasn’t arrived, you can point at the thing, or you can put it on.
Whether a style that nobody authored can be called original, or only recognized, is the question art deco leaves behind.
I
A Style Without a Manifesto
The early twentieth century was the great age of the artistic manifesto: Futurism in 1909, De Stijl in 1918, the Bauhaus in 1919, Surrealism in 1924, each telling you in advance what it was and what it despised. Art deco told you nothing in advance. Its theories came after its forms. The rules of the 1925 exposition, published in 1922, were a door policy rather than a doctrine, admitting only work of new inspiration and real originality and banning imitation of the old styles. Paul Frankl’s skyscraper bookcases were selling years before his book explained them, and Hugh Ferriss published his city of the future seven years after he had drawn its shape. The one theorist who ran ahead was Norman Bel Geddes, whose Horizons popularized streamlining in 1932. Dan Klein, who headed the twentieth-century decorative arts department at Christie’s, put it flatly: “It had no founder, no manifesto, and no philosophy.” It simply happened, he wrote, because the designers of postwar Paris were answering a restructured society, and that is the shrug in which most accounts of the style end.
Its French phase had a lineage it was proud of, the eighteenth-century cabinetmakers, and a debt to the German-speaking world. The luxury of ebony, shagreen and ivory took shape in Paris after the Werkbund showed its rooms at the Salon d’Automne of 1910 and Paul Poiret came home from Vienna in 1911 and opened a workshop. Even the French phase began with something found abroad, and the forms the world now recognizes as deco, the stepped tower and the rounded radio, came later, from further outside still.
The modernists argued relentlessly, and an early printing of the abbreviation is theirs. Le Corbusier had run a series of articles in L’Esprit Nouveau, the magazine he edited with Amédée Ozenfant, under the headline “1925 EXPO. ARTS. DÉCO.”, and in 1925 he collected them as L’Art décoratif d’aujourd’hui. Modern decorative art, ran his refrain, has no decoration, and the things of daily use should be anonymous standard types made by industry. Modernism did not refuse the powder compact. It let the compact in only on its own terms, anonymous, standard and plain, and it had a theory of history and a theory of ethics to explain why. Deco let the compact in as itself, and could only point at a ziggurat and say: look.
The pavilion built to carry the argument, the Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau, opened on July 18, almost three months after the exposition itself: a white box of standard furniture with a tree growing through a hole in its roof, meant to deny decorative art and to show architecture running from the smallest object of use to the house, the street and the city. The organizers put up a fence to hide part of it, and it took the Ministry of Fine Arts to have the fence taken down. The loudest argument made at art deco’s birth was made by its enemy, late, and the hosts tried to keep it out of sight.
II
The Ziggurat Was a By-law
Ask anyone to draw art deco and they will draw a stepped tower, its tiers climbing like a temple into the Manhattan sky, and the romantic explanation is ready to hand. The 1920s were mad for lost civilizations. The Carnegie Institution began work at Chichen Itza in 1924, and Aztec motifs ran up the facade of Joseph Younger’s Kennedy-Warren apartments in Washington. Deco’s designers, the story goes, looked at the stepped pyramids of Yucatán and saw the future.
The unromantic explanation is a zoning resolution. In 1916 New York passed the first comprehensive zoning law in the United States, and light was one of its concerns. The Equitable Building on lower Broadway threw a shadow of some seven acres across its neighbors, and the new law required tall buildings to step back from the street as they rose, so that daylight could still reach the pavement. Architects were not sure what that meant for their designs, so in 1922 Harvey Wiley Corbett asked Hugh Ferriss to draw it.
Ferriss made four drawings. They show no building, only the greatest mass of rentable space the law allowed on a city block, carved back in stages until it became a stepped mountain. He worked in black crayon, pulling tone off with a paper stump and erasing the highlights out, so that the mass seems to loom out of its own weather. The drawings taught architects to read the law not as a restriction but as a source of form; Carol Willis would later write a history of the skyscrapers of New York and Chicago on the premise that form follows finance, and Ferriss’s four sheets are where you can watch it happen. The law did not invent the step, and the Mayan enthusiasm was real. What the law did was make the step the price of bulk. Over a quarter of its lot a tower could rise as high as it liked, which is why the Chrysler’s shaft could climb at all, and the step and the shaft together are the difference between a motif and a skyline.
Ferriss held a contradiction. He illustrated his March 1922 article in The New York Times with drawings from the series, and in it, by Cooper Hewitt’s account, he argued that steel and glass had made the unornamented skyscraper the only truthful one. But in the pen-and-ink fantasies he drew in the same years, the setback towers stand amid the scenery of the ancient Near East and Imperial Rome, and setback skyscrapers were often called modern ziggurats, New York a new Babylon. His article argued for the bare tower while his fantasies dressed it, and the city took the mass and left the argument. The architects dressed the mountain too: eagles on the setbacks, sunbursts on the crowns, and a story about Yucatán. The Mayan temple was not the source of the skyline. It was the alibi.
III
What the Resin Wanted
The materials tell the same story. Deco is usually described as a style that used bakelite, chrome and colored glass, as though its designers had chosen them from a palette. It is nearer the truth to say that the materials used the designers.
Bakelite, the first synthetic plastic, created by Leo Baekeland in 1907, is a thermoset. Once it has cured under heat and pressure it cannot be melted or reshaped; it takes its shape once, in the mold, and the mold has opinions. When Wells Coates designed the round Ekco radio in 1932, the circle fitted the round speaker behind it, and by avoiding sharp edges and corners the case played to the properties of the pressed resin; he did not disguise the machine as a cabinet. Coates was a modernist, the architect of the Isokon flats in Hampstead, and the mold did not ask. It produced the deco curve with a modernist standing over it. The form belonged to neither camp, and only one camp had a doctrine against it.
The colorful sets of the decade were another chemistry, Catalin, cast rather than pressed, and finished by hand, and the decade turned out so many different cases for an economic reason. Radio technology had slowed, the Depression had emptied household budgets, and manufacturers sold new sets by restyling the case. Form followed the sales department.
Gottfried Semper argued in the 1860s that style arises from material, technique and purpose. Alois Riegl answered him in 1893, and by 1901 had a name for the answer, the Kunstwollen, an artistic will that uses materials rather than obeying them. Riegl would say the mold chose nothing: someone chose to make the radio round rather than fight the resin with trim, and that choice is a will like any other. He is right, and the argument survives him. Every style is what its materials will do. Gothic is what stone will do in compression, and modernism is what a cantilever will do. The difference lies not in the causes but in the claim. Modernism bent concrete to a theory and put its name to the result; deco let the resin have its way and claimed nothing. The will was there; it was a will to consent. When the slump emptied household budgets, the style changed shape to sell, and it had no theory to resist with.
IV
The Tomb and the Ship
The motifs came from outside as well, and a tomb shows what kind of thing they were. On November 4, 1922, Howard Carter’s men found a step cut into the floor of the Valley of the Kings, and on the afternoon of the 26th Carter breached a sealed doorway, put a candle through the gap and saw, by his own account, wonderful things. Lord Carnarvon sold the exclusive to The Times, and the unpacking of the tomb ran like a serial. Lotus buds, scarabs and winged discs poured into jewelry and cinema lobbies. Egypt was already in fashion, with Grauman’s Egyptian open in Hollywood a few weeks before the candle, and it was one import among many: the Ballets Russes had reached Paris in 1909 with no excavation behind them, and the Maya, Japanese lacquer and the repertoire of empire fed the style as richly. What the tomb shows is that deco’s motifs were neither invented nor, in the ordinary sense, influences. They were dug up, by other people, for other reasons, and reported in the newspaper.
A ship shows how it ended. The French Line took the hull lines for its next flagship from Vladimir Yourkevitch, a naval architect of the Imperial Russian Navy who had come west as an émigré, and the decorators would work inside the volume his lines enclosed. When the slump came, one British rival was cancelled and another, the future Queen Mary, stood unfinished on the slip; the French, heavily subsidized by their government, carried on. The Normandie was laid down at Saint-Nazaire on January 26, 1931, and launched on October 29, 1932, three years to the day after Black Tuesday. She was not the Depression’s child but its survivor.
Inside, the old luxury made its last stand. Lalique’s twelve illuminated glass pillars and ranks of tall lamps lit a first-class dining room ninety-three meters long, and the comparison repeated ever since is that the room was longer than the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. The vessel that stood for the future was measured against Louis XIV. In New York the alibi had been Mayan; at Saint-Nazaire it was the ancien régime.
She reached New York on August 28, 1939, and was laid up at Pier 88. France declared war six days later, and she never sailed again. The United States seized her in December 1941 and began turning her into a troopship, and on the afternoon of February 9, 1942, she caught fire. Yourkevitch went to the pier and was kept from those in command. Heavy with the water poured in to fight the fire, she rolled onto her side in the Hudson a little before three the next morning. It took eighteen months to right her, and after the war the hull was cut up for scrap. That is how the style went too: in the middle of a conversion to something more useful, and nobody made a speech.
V
The Found Style
The stepped skyline came from a by-law and the curve from a mold; the late manner came out of a slump and the motifs out of the ground. Trace the forms of art deco to their sources and you leave art behind, for law, chemistry, money and a newspaper serial. By the standard modernism set, originality as authorship, the designer imposing a concept on matter, deco has nothing to show. There is an obvious objection, that there were many art decos under one label and “found” is only a flattering word for eclectic. But eclecticism picks. A found style is picked. The circumstances did the choosing, and the designers consented. That may be the original thing about it.
Deco was the first style made by the twentieth century rather than about it. The modernists held a picture of the modern world before the world had properly arrived and built in its image: the machine as moral teacher, the house as a machine for living in, the white wall as hygiene made visible. Deco held no picture. It let the century in through the door, the regulations and the resins and the price of ivory and the discovery that a dead king’s furniture could sell newspapers, and it is a found style in the sense that Duchamp’s urinal is a found object: made elsewhere, for other purposes, and recognized as art only afterwards.
That is why it could go everywhere. Hillier called it “the last of the total styles,” and reckoned its reach from the skyscraper and the liner down to the powder compact and the letter-box. Turn his sentence over and the last total style is the first found one. A theory is also a set of terms. Modernism reached down to the smallest object of use and admitted it only as a type; deco let the powder compact in as itself, because nothing forbade it. Both went everywhere, but modernism’s totality was a conquest and deco’s a permission. It did not lack politics: the 1925 exposition was France’s answer to German design, its exotica came out of empire, and in 2025, the exposition’s centenary, Catherine Slessor charged the style with glossing over turmoil and Edward Denison with letting its glamour conceal the colonial rule under which much of it was built. What it lacked was a prohibition, and a style with no prohibition cannot refuse what it is handed, whether a zoning envelope, a pharaoh or an empire. It was total because it was empty, and it was loved because it was empty. It asked the public to believe nothing. It only asked them to look.
Art deco was a style of excavation, and it was excavated in its turn. Modernism got a time of death instead. In 1977 Charles Jencks dated it to 3:32 in the afternoon of July 15, 1972, “or thereabouts,” the moment, he wrote, when the Pruitt-Igoe housing blocks in St. Louis were dynamited; the first blocks had come down that spring, a few months before his date. Even modernism’s death certificate was written afterwards, five years late, by an enemy. Deco never received one. What it received, from admirers, was a name, and the name came with the digging. Since then it can be dug up again whenever a culture tires of ideas and wants something to look at, and last year one online dealer reported that its deco sales had tripled.
The man who did most to dig it up was born in March 1940, seven months into the war that ended it. By the middle of the 1960s Bevis Hillier was the sale-room correspondent of The Times, covering a trade that was already using the name. So, by November 1966, was an article in his own paper, and a year later an essay in Elle. When he wrote his book the style was, by his own account, despised. He did not coin its name. He put it on a title page in 1968, at twenty-eight, and three years later, after his exhibition in Minneapolis, it was the word everyone used. Van Alen had the thing in his hands and no name for it. Hillier had the name and no hand in the thing.
Made without a name, named without a maker.
⁂
The occasion is Dezeen’s Art Deco Centenary series and its A to Z of art deco (April 29, 2025). Bevis Hillier is quoted from his piece for that series (March 10, 2025), and his post at The Times from Contemporary Authors; Dan Klein from his introduction to In the Deco Style, as reprinted by the Art Deco Society of California; Charles Jencks from The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977). The spire is from the Skyscraper Museum and the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s designation report; the 1931 ball from the National Archives, Vanity Fair and The Smart Set; the Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau from the Fondation Le Corbusier; the 1916 resolution from the Skyscraper Museum and the Museum of the City of New York; Hugh Ferriss’s drawings and article from Cooper Hewitt, and his fantasy drawings from the Skyscraper Museum; the Ekco radio and Catalin from Cooper Hewitt and the V&A; Carter from the Griffith Institute’s excavation journals; the Normandie from RIBA, the Metropolitan Museum, the Musée Lalique, Shipscribe and American Heritage. The history of the name is from Benton, Benton and Wood’s Art Deco 1910–1939 (2003), at second hand. Quotations keep their sources’ spelling.
Drafted with Claude Opus 5.5; literary editing by Claude Sonnet 5.5; outside literary editing by Claude Fable 5.1. Images generated with Gemini Argon for this essay.