Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 1, January 1993 | Page 94

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successful rescue efforts of the revivalist preservationists did include
some of the previously mentioned architectural landmarks along
with many others throughout the United States.
Artifacts and furnishings of this period are also being
rediscovered for their aesthetic relevance to Postmodern building
interiors. As current interior design trends favor eclectic directions.
Art Deco pieces are often used as accents to provide focal points or
define areas of visual interests in both residential and commercial
interiors. In New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles antique showrooms,
where quality authentic Art Deco light fixtures, furnishings, and
accessories still can be found, collectors' and designers' demand have
notably increased in recent years and exceeded supply. These pieces
are not sought after for purposes of creating a "retrolook" in interiors,
rather they are valued for their characteristics and design integrity
that can innately enhance interiors.
Allusive Contemporaneity
Today's design professionals often pontificate on a new nK)demism
that is distinctively expressed with a rich and strong creative design
vocabulary that is anything but historically regressive. They regard
revivalism in design antithetical to this culture and a betrayal of our
times and modem technology. Their designs materialize in glass,
steel, and wood, visually richer than the so-called pragmatic,
uncreative and boring box buildings with which the Modernists of the
International Style are charged. Yet these new modern design
concepts seem marbleized with veins of Art Deco. These are not copies
by «my means, but moods of Art Deco do emerge in a thematic sense,
and in underlying design philosophies that govern the principles of
organization of design elements inherent in Art Deco.
Art Deco synthesized visual imagery from the times of antiquity
and the imagined distant future, and it incorporated popularized
forms of visual representations of electronic technologies and
communications. While the early themes of the 1920s emphasized an
interplay between African and Oriental influences, the Art Deco of
the 1930s was clearly Machine Age inspired. Streamlining was
assertively expressed with boldly conceived designs in concrete, neon,
glass block, etched glass, plastics, polished and satin chrome,
porthole windows, metal railings, and "eye-brow" windows.