Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 1, January 1993 | Page 91

Postmodern Moods of Art Deco

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The creative energies of these two decades aesthetically
electrified every designed area of modern life.
Buildings,
furnishings, and artifacts, such as silverware, ceramics, jewelry, light
fixtures all exemplified the spirited interplay among the design
elements integrated according to principles unique to Art Deco. In
America some of the finest creative Art Deco achievements are
probably the Chrysler Building, an Art Deco sky scraper. Radio City
Music Hall (both in New York City), the Hoover Dam in Nevada,
and the Lower Miami Beach area, today referred to as the Deco
District.
The Chrysler Building was designed by William Van Alen and
completed in 1930.^ Its bold, immediately assertive architectural
statement with its soaring mass commands the viewer's eyes skyward
to the enlarged details of Chrysler car designs richly ornamenting the
tower. Like other Art Deco sky scrapers of its time, it confirmed
continued American superiority in such architectural prowess and
fueled the onlooker’s fire of aspirations toward prosjjerity. It also
inspired an urban and civil identity that reinforced a pride of place.
Today it remains an influential structure as a source of inspiration for
designers of modem skyscrapers.
Radio City Music Hall in Rockefeller Center was designed by
architects Reinhard, Hofmeister, Corbett, and Hood, and built
between 1929 and 1940.^ The lounge concept is pronouncedly influenced
by the then fashionable French stylization of theaters. Within a
sequence of gently focused spaces synergistically functioning as a
larger volume, it incorporates intricately detaile d veneer work and
elegant soft furnishings defined by ambient lighting. It is an
integrative interior architectural statement about urban cultural
wealth that conveys a sense of luxury without intimidation. The
flow of spaces intensifies emotions of anticipation prior to
performances, and afterwards eases the return from fantasy back to
reality.
Hoover Dam, located on the Nevada and Arizona state line, was
built between 1931 and 1935.^ A civil engineering masterpiece, in
which the modernism of the Machine Age transcended into the realm
of utility, it dazzles the imagination with its parametric, and
superbly rational stmctural forms. The mass of the spillway with its
fort-like drum gates effortlessly leaning back against the waters of
Lake Mead is punctuated by the intake towers majestically sitting in