Illustrated Lecture
Art Deco Metropolis: The Whiz-Bang Buildings of Modern New York
The Chrysler Building, the Waldorf-Astoria, Rockefeller Center-- these are among the hundreds of Art Deco
monuments that during the 1920s and ‘30s helped create the image of New York City as the world’s Modern
Metropolis. Coined in the 1960s to describe a style of French decorative arts, “Art Deco” now refers to almost
anything from saltcellars to skyscrapers, produced anywhere in the world during the early decades of this
century, using abstract, stylized floral, geometric, or streamlined design. In New York, Art Deco evolved through
a series of Manhattan skyscrapers into the city’s chief architectural language. Following a massive reawakening
of interest in them during the 1970s, New York’s Deco buildings today survive as prized remnants of a distant yet
modern past that still help define the city’s visual identity.
The lecture covers the great skyscrapers of architects Raymond Hood, William Van Alen, Ely Jacques Kahn and
Ralph Walker, including the Daily News, Empire State, Irving Trust, General Electric, American Radiator,
Barclay-Vesey and RCA Buildings. It then traces the adaptation of this “skyscraper style” through apartment
buildings on the Bronx’s Grand Concourse, airport terminals at LaGuardia, the Central Park West residential
skyline, automated midtown parking garages, diners, hotels, department stores, banks, and theaters like Radio
City Music Hall.
Tony Robins was a founding member of the Art Deco Society of New York.