Art Deco Britain E-Book

Elain Harwood

• Herausgeber: Batsford
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 222

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

The definitive guide to Art Deco buildings in Britain. The perennially popular style of Art Deco influenced architecture and design all over the world in the 1920s and 1930s – from elegant Parisian theatres to glamorous Manhattan skyscrapers. The style was also adopted by British architects, but, until now, there has been little that really explains the what, where and how of Art Deco buildings in Britain. In Art Deco Britain, leading architecture historian and writer Elain Harwood, brings her trademark clarity and enthusiasm to the subject as she explores Britain's Art Deco buildings. Art Deco Britain, published in association with the Twentieth Century Society, is the definitive guide to the architectural style in Britain. The book begins with an overview of the international Art Deco style, and how this influenced building design in Britain. The buildings covered include Houses and Flats; Churches and Public Buildings; Offices; Hotels and Public Houses; Cinemas, Theatres and Concert Halls; and many more. The book covers some of the best-loved and some lesser-known buildings around the UK, such as the Midland Hotel in Morecambe, Eltham Palace, Broadcasting House and the Carreras Cigarette Factory in London. Beautifully produced and richly illustrated with architectural photography, this is the definitive guide to a much-loved architecture style.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

HOUSESAND FLATS

WOLVERTON

FINELLA

YAFFLE HILL

ST ANDREW’S GARDENS

ELTHAM PALACE

DORSET HOUSE

THE PANTILES

LICHFIELD COURT

EALING VILLAGE

FRINTON PARK ESTATE

PINNER COURT

MARINE COURT

SAN REMO TOWERS

APPLEBY LODGE

CAUSEWAYSIDE

CHURCHES AND PUBLIC & INSTITUTIONAL BUILDINGS

COUNCIL HOUSE

NEW HORTICULTURAL HALL/WESTMINSTER SCHOOL SPORTS CENTRE

OLYMPIA EMPIRE HALL/OLYMPIA CENTRAL

ROYAL MASONIC HOSPITAL

BROTHERTON LIBRARY

ST CHRISTOPHER

BROADCASTING HOUSE

THE BRANGWYN HALL

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

SENATE HOUSE AND INSTITUTE OF EDUCATION

ST MATTHEW’S (THE GLASS CHURCH)

ROYAL INSTITUTE OF BRITISH ARCHITECTS (RIBA)

HORNSEY TOWN HALL

HAWKHEAD HOSPITAL/HAWKHEAD VILLAGE

LADY BANKES SCHOOL

ST ANDREW’S HOUSE

HESTON AND ISLEWORTH FIRE STATION

BRENTFORD HEALTH CENTRE/ALEXANDRA HOUSE

KENTON LIBRARY

OFFICES

ADELAIDE HOUSE

PETERBOROUGH HOUSE (DAILY TELEGRAPH)

ST OLAF HOUSE HAY’S WHARF

DAILY EXPRESS BUILDING

BOURNEMOUTH ECHO OFFICES

PRINCES HOUSE

IBEX HOUSE

PILKINGTON OFFICES/REFLECTION COURT

SHOPS, SHOWROOMS AND CAFÉS

THE WOLSELEY

GREYBROOK HOUSE

IDEAL HOUSE/PALLADIUM HOUSE

DERRY & TOMS AND BARKERS

CO-OPERATIVE HOUSE

ROGANO

NARDINI’S

SIMPSON’S/WATERSTONES PICCADILLY

BURTON TAILORS

WOOLWORTH’S/ALBERT AND THE LION

RANDALLS DEPARTMENT STORE

CO-OPERATIVE EMPORIUM/DANUM HOUSE

KENDAL MILNE & CO./HOUSE OF FRASER

E. PELLICCI CAFÉ

ALFREDO’S CAFÉ/MEAT PEOPLE

HOTELS AND PUBLIC HOUSES

PARK LANE HOTEL/SHERATON GRAND HOTEL PARK LANE

CLARIDGE’S

BURGH ISLAND HOTEL

THE KING AND QUEEN

MIDLAND HOTEL

SAUNTON SANDS HOTEL

NAG’S HEAD

REGENT PALACE HOTEL/BRASSERIE ZÉDEL

THREE MAGPIES

BLUE PETER

THE MAYBURY/GROSVENOR CASINO

HOME ALES BREWERY/SIR J. ROBINSON HOUSE

THE BERESFORD HOTEL

ROYAL YORK HOTEL

WHITE TOWER CASINO

TEST MATCH HOTEL

CINEMAS, THEATRES AND CONCERT HALLS

ASTORIA CINEMA/ACADEMY

SAVOY THEATRE

CARLTON CINEMA / GRACEPOINT

NEW VICTORIA CINEMA/APOLLO VICTORIA THEATRE

SHAKESPEARE MEMORIAL THEATRE

GRANADA CINEMA/BUZZ BINGO

PLAZA CINEMA

FORUM CINEMA

BRIGHTON DOME AND CORN EXCHANGE

ODEON/EVERYMAN CINEMA

GROSVENOR CINEMA/ZOROASTRIAN CENTRE

NORTHWICK CINEMA/GRAYS OF WORCESTER

APOLLO CINEMA/O2 APOLLO

ODEON CINEMA/ATHENA

PHILHARMONIC HALL

WINTER GARDENS

SPORTS BUILDINGS

TINSIDE LIDO

ARSENAL FOOTBALL GROUND/HIGHBURY STADIUM SQUARE

JUBILEE POOL

MOUNTS BATHS

WALTHAMSTOW STADIUM

SALTDEAN LIDO

INDUSTRIAL PREMISES

CARRERAS CIGARETTE FACTORY/GREATER LONDON HOUSE

INDIA OF INCHINNAN

OXO TOWER

OVALTINE FACTORY/OVALTINE COURT

BATTERSEA POWER STATION

HOOVER BUILDING

COTY FACTORY/SOFTSEL COMPUTERS

ADDIS FACTORY/RIVERSMEAD

PITHEAD BATHS

LUMA LAMP FACTORY/LUMA TOWER

LITTLEWOODS

TRANSPORT

GEORGE’S DOCK VENTILATION AND CENTRAL CONTROL STATION, MERSEY TUNNEL

DEX GARAGE

VICTORIA COACH STATION

DAIMLER HIRE GARAGE/MCCANN ERICKSON

OSTERLEY STATION

SHOREHAM AIRPORT (BRIGHTON CITY AIRPORT)

LIVERPOOL (SPEKE) AIRPORT/CROWNE PLAZA LIVERPOOL JOHN LENNON AIRPORT HOTEL

STATES OF JERSEY AIRPORT

SURBITON STATION

EMPIRE AIR TERMINAL/NATIONAL AUDIT OFFICE

FOOTNOTES

INDEX

COPYRIGHT

INTRODUCTION

In the 1930s, a sixpenny (2½p) ticket to the cinema brought an opulent interior in the latest taste within reach of everyone in Britain. The coquettish twists of metals, marquetry and mosaics are symbolic of an age of glamour that the movies conveyed, even if real life was not like that. The difference between rich and poor was vast at this time – yet each was more aware of the other’s world than ever before thanks to advances in transport, publishing and the movies. Architecture sought to bridge something of the gap. What we now call Art Deco embraced many sources. Architects were more aware of ‘a style for the job’ than of one overriding idiom and no period embraced such diversity of building as the two decades between the world wars. The architecture of luxury is hardest to find today, for most of the restaurants and hotels and virtually all the ocean liners synonymous with the era are gone, and many survivors in London’s West End are a pastiche of their former selves. But among Britain’s more prosaic buildings built in the 1920s and 1930s are many that tell a broader story, while including fashionably modernistic elements, a sense of either massiveness or movement – contrasts that define an era of individuality and extremes. It is this variety, and the accessibility of modernity to all, that may explain why the architecture has wide appeal today.

This introduction begins with the influence of American classicism and the sources of decorative modern styles from around the world. Many of these came together in the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes held in Paris in 1925, which four decades later gave Art Deco its name. Contemporary accounts, when not wholly dismissive of the middle ground between modernism and classicism, wrote about jazz-modern, a descriptive term that succinctly referenced both the music of the age and the jagged diagonals with their sense of movement found in much architectural decoration. If the term Art Deco existed at all it was as a diminutive, referring to the exhibition. In 1966 the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris held an exhibition, Les Années 25: Art Déco, Bauhaus, Stijl, Esprit nouveau, shorthand for the multiplicity of movements across Europe at that time. Hillary Gelson lifted the phrase ‘Art Déco’ for a review in The Times and two years later Bevis Hillier made it stick with his book, Art Deco of the 20s and 30s. In practice, however, much of what we call Art Deco today is a simplified but attractive ‘moderne’ style indebted to Dutch and German models that became pervasive in the 1930s. This was the style of many of the new building types of the decade, of airports, public buildings and the seaside, made possible by increased familiarity with concrete and steel construction.

Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, 1925. The entrance at the Alexander III Bridge, with, to the right, Robert Mallet-Stevens’s information point and clock tower

AMERICAN CLASSICISM

In early 1919, Robert Atkinson, principal of London’s fastest-growing school of architecture, the Architectural Association, secured a sabbatical to study education and cinema design in the United States. There he witnessed New York’s latest sensation, the luxurious super cinemas being erected under the supervision of Sam ‘Roxy’ Rothapfel. They included the world’s first 5,000-seat cinema, the Capitol Theatre, opened that year to the designs of Thomas W. Lamb. It took the established classical style of public buildings – the very name Capitol set the tone – and subverted it by simplification and gilding for a popular audience. Atkinson brought the super cinema to Britain with his Regent, Brighton, opened in 1923, and with it a striking form of American classicism. He went on to design many of Britain’s most thoroughgoing Art Deco buildings.

The wider story of Art Deco in Britain begins with this updated American classicism. It could be explored on the office stool thanks to the growing availability of American magazines and advances in architectural education, although easier travel increased its impact. While Atkinson’s successors at the Architectural Association made links with northern Europe, in the 1920s Britain’s largest and most potent school of architecture remained that in Liverpool, umbilically linked by ocean liner with New York. Its powerful head, (Sir) Charles Reilly, drew the school’s alumni into a close-knit group who recognised their ‘Prof’ as the profession’s elder statesman, and following his retirement in 1933 they continued to teach a distinctive style of architecture through successive appointments from among their number. Reilly’s methodology followed that of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, based around grand but logical planning exercises and the latest construction techniques, which students clothed in an Imperial Roman style as reconsidered in the Italian Renaissance or 17th-century France. Americans had thronged to Parisian ateliers since the 1880s, and the Beaux-Arts provided a consistent formula for North America’s public buildings and commercial architecture until the Depression. Throughout the 1920s, Reilly sent his most promising students to work in the leading New York offices, where they saw how classicism could be distorted and decorated into a heavyweight form of Art Deco more prevalent even than it was in Paris.

The Regent Palace, Brighton, by Robert Atkinson, 1920–21, demolished 1974

Other British architects also developed close connections with the United States. (Sir) John Burnet was the first Scot to train under the Beaux-Arts programme, in 1872–76, and disseminated its values to his young staff, along with American contacts. He built extensively across Scotland before, in 1904, he won a competition for the extension of the British Museum that led him to open a London office. He brought south a brilliant young assistant, Thomas Smith Tait, who became a partner only after a bitter quarrel had led him to spend over a year in New York. Francis Lorne joined them after working in the United States for over 15 years; he brought to the firm not only American architectural predilections but also its stylish suits and silk shirts (which stood out against conservative British dress) and an assiduous cultivation of new clients and publicity. Through several mutations the practice (known in the 1930s as Burnet, Tait & Lorne) charted the evolution of architecture in Britain from classicism to the moderne, always with a decorative twist that places its buildings in the Art Deco canon yet without losing the dignity that won it a series of major public buildings.

Pyrene Factory (Westlink House), Great West Road, 1928–30 by Wallis, Gilbert & Partners

Only a little less exciting were the American influences on new factories, when its companies established European markets for their consumer goods. Many had ties to the vehicle industry, such as Firestone and India tyres, but Wrigley’s gum, Hoover vacuum cleaners and Pyrene fire extinguishers also secured large sites on the new roads that radiated from Britain’s major cities in the 1920s. Their factories were organised on rational production lines behind bold facades that could convey a simple message of modernity and sound construction to passing motorists in a few seconds. American techniques lay at their heart, for from the United States came an efficient method of reinforced concrete construction when in 1907 the Kahn brothers, Moritz and Julius, began to market their patent reinforcement bars in Britain as ‘Truscon’, a subsidiary of their Trussed Concrete Steel Company based in Detroit. The firm provided a valuable training at the interface of architecture and engineering for the young Owen Williams, the engineer responsible for some of Britain’s finest early Modern Movement buildings.

NEW CONSTRUCTION TECHNIQUES

The 1920s saw the maturity of the two forms of framed construction that distinguish 20th-century architecture from that of earlier eras: reinforced concrete and steel. Concrete – an artificial stone made from lime or cement mixed with an aggregate of sand and pebbles – goes back to Roman times, but from the late 19th-century reinforcement bars or wire mesh were embedded in the mix to add tensile strength. Companies from France and then the United States patented their bars in Britain. Steel, which offered greater tensile qualities than cast iron, was smelted in a sufficient quantity to be used in buildings from the 1880s. The first framed buildings of concrete and steel appeared in Britain a decade later, but their numbers grew when the London Building Act of 1909 permitted their use in the capital behind a thin cladding rather than a self-supporting wall. Kodak House, erected in 1910–11 by Burnet and Tait as the European headquarters of the famous photographic company, had a stripped down facade and large windows in which the presence of the supporting steel frame could be clearly read – a suitably scientific and progressive image for a modern business and a model for office building after the First World War. Concrete and steel frames made possible the towers and contorted shapes of Art Deco, giant overhangs and greater spans. Again cinemas were good examples, from the advertising towers on the outside to the huge auditoria where massive steel girders permitted perfect sightlines without columns. Additionally, steel was used for windows, a practical necessity thanks to a shortage of timber after the First World War, becoming fashionable with good marketing.

A skin of chromium oxide to prevent steel from rusting appeared in the 1920s; sometimes known as ‘Staybrite’ steel, it was used on the canopy of the Savoy Theatre in 1929. Glazed terracotta bricks or tiles, known as faience, had long been used in courtyards and functional interiors for their shiny, easily washed-down finishes, but now came to the fore for their ornamental qualities. New techniques made glass cheaper and available in larger sheets: Pilkington’s secured British licences in 1910 to manufacture machine-drawn cylinder glass and in the 1920s to make Vitrolite, an opaque compound available in a variety of colours whose name was applied across the genre of structural glass, just like that of Crittall was used to refer to all makes of the steel windows that gave the new architecture its machine-finished appearance.

Although local authorities, led by the London County Council, were wary of new structural techniques, government buildings lay outside their control. Architects in the Office of Works became specialists in the use of reinforced concrete and in 1914 Truscon head-hunted one of their number, Thomas Wallis, to open an office as Wallis, Gilbert & Partners, nominally with an American sleeping partner. Gilbert’s identity remains a mystery or (as Wallis’s biographer Joan Skinner suggested) he may have been entirely fictitious. Wallis provided simple Beaux-Arts facades for the Kahn brothers’ concrete factories, until in the 1920s his practice blossomed with the introduction of exotic decoration based on giant orders of columns that were distinctive for their brilliant colours and Egyptian motifs. Wallis’s most intricate example was a factory for Firestone tyres built on London’s Great West Road in 1928, a colossal temple to the gods Amun and Ra with details of green, vermillion and midnight blue. Marcus Collins of architects Collins & Porri was a still more passionate advocate of Egyptian motifs.

Firestone Factory, Great West Road, 1924–28 by Wallis, Gibert & Partners

SOURCES FOR ART DECO

Greek, Egyptian and other exotic motifs formed a major strand of what we today call Art Deco, the decoration of large, framed buildings with modern interpretations of historicist styles from all ages and cultures. They were created using the latest claddings, plus linoleum products and early plastics such as Bakelite. Greek and Egyptian architecture share some common origins, both being based on decorative orders of columns and beams. Sloping or battered facades balanced by very large splayed cornices, capitals incorporating palm, papyrus buds or lotus leaf motifs, and simply moulded entablatures enhanced with Egyptian figures and runes had appeared sporadically in western architecture before Napoleon’s invasion in 1798 prompted more detailed study. Another revival followed the First World War in an enthusiasm for those cultures untainted by Europe’s soured history, encouraged by advances in photographic publishing. Variety theatres had long celebrated exotic architecture, as Victorian venues with names like Alhambra and Hippodrome testify, and the Louxor (Luxor) Cinema in Paris, built in 1920–21 was just one example of a newly completed building with Egyptian motifs when in November 1922 Howard Carter discovered the undisturbed tomb of the boy-king Tutankhamun. A craze for Egyptian motifs swept across the decorative arts, from furniture to book design and fashion; even Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon wore an outfit embroidered with Egyptian motifs when she married the future George VI in 1923. Other exotic sources of inspiration included the Orient, Mayan and Aztec temples and African carvings.

MODERNISM

Other sources were closer in time. The evolution of Art Deco out of Art Nouveau is less easily seen in architecture than in the fine and decorative arts, part of the Romantic Movement that blossomed around 1900. A trail of simple and sinuous motifs can be seen across Europe – especially in smaller and emerging countries such as Belgium, Finland and Latvia – and in America at around the same time. Art Nouveau made little impact on Britain’s prosaic culture, and when the rugged realism of the Arts and Crafts Movement gave way to neo-classicism inspired by Christopher Wren, it seemed that the architecture of St Paul’s Cathedral and Hampton Court had been assimilated as a national style. A severe classicism dominated British architecture in the 1920s. In 1925 Peter Behrens built New Ways in Northampton, generally considered to be the first Modern Movement house in Britain, although it featured a version of classical dentils in the detailing of its porch.

Modernist architecture and Art Deco have more common sources than their respective fans might admit. A decisive shift in architectural taste towards modernism only occurred in Britain around 1933–34, seen in magazines such as the Architectural Review and in the schools of architecture. British taste, like that of northern Europe and its American diaspora, was always circumspect about decoration, and in the most luxurious buildings the distinctions between Art Deco and modernism can be blurred, since both laid emphasis on the quality of the finest veneers and finishes over superficial ornament.

Louxor (Luxor) Cinema, Barbès, Paris, 1920–21 by Henri Zipcy

In a book published to accompany their exhibition on the International Style at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson extolled modernism’s principles as an ‘emphasis upon volume, space enclosed by thin planes or surfaces as opposed to the suggestion of mass and solidity; regularity as opposed to symmetry or other kinds of obvious balance; and lastly, dependence upon the intrinsic elegance of materials, technical perfection, and fine proportions, as opposed to applied ornament’.1 The exhibition, held in 1932, included only one British building, Joseph Emberton’s Royal Corinthian Yacht Club, built in 1930–31 at Burnham-on-Crouch, Essex, a complex, steel-framed structure disguised as a rectangular rendered box with large windows, overlooking the river. Even here, in his letters to Emberton, Johnson criticised the circular external staircase and a slanted row of windows as overly decorative. In a similar spirit, Berthold Lubetkin proclaimed that the slender, unfaceted shape of the door handles designed for his Highpoint flats in north London was ‘modern, not moderne’.2

The key source for both modernism and Art Deco was Vienna, entrenched as the creative capital of Eastern Europe even as its political power declined. The architect Adolf Loos provided a link between the city and the United States, his architectural sensibilities stimulated by a stay in 1893–96. Regularised patterns in brilliant colours appeared in the highly decorative work of the Wiener Werkstätte in Vienna and the Deutsche Werkbund around 1900. Otto Wagner’s Wienzeile houses in Vienna of 1898, one clad in majolica-glazed tiles patterned with flowers, were followed the next year by offices and flats for Portois & Fix from his pupil Max Fabiani, where similarly brilliant tiles glow in the evening sunshine.

Viennese organisations also exhibited and published works by British architects, in particular Charles Rennie Mackintosh and M.H. Baillie Scott, who secured a dozen commissions in Europe. Both entered an international competition run by a Darmstadt publisher for a ‘house for an art-lover’, with Scott’s entry effectively the winner although Mackintosh’s incomplete entry was more admired and widely published. The square panelling and jagged spearhead decoration of Mackintosh’s last major interior, at No.78 Derngate, Northampton, from 1916 exemplifies much of the symmetrical, cubist and most vibrant patterning of early Art Deco. The same client, W.J. Bassett-Lowke, later commissioned New Ways. Glowing, too, were Leon Bakst’s rich set designs for the Ballets Russes, seen across Europe as Serge Diaghilev endlessly toured his company following a triumphant launch in Paris in 1909; they attracted younger artists and choreographers into the 1920s, when long seasons in London provided some financial stability.

Perhaps only the critic and cartoonist Osbert Lancaster could ridicule both genres. In his book Homes Sweet Homes of 1939, he lampooned both the skinny aesthete perched nervously on his Alvar Aalto stool and the buxom bon viveur reclining on her over-stuffed sofa, cocktail in hand, swooning over her beloved lapdogs amid a clutter of fan-shaped mirrors and objets d’art. In addition to his pages on ‘functional’ and ‘modernistic’ styles, Lancaster offered such confections as ‘Curzon St Baroque’, ‘Stockbrokers Tudor’ and ‘Vogue Regency’ to describe the homes of his middle- and upper-class neighbours. Today, ‘Art Deco’ is an umbrella term for many of these idioms, for which there is no clear definition such as Johnson used for modernism.3

78 Derngate, Northampton, remodelled in 1916–17 by Charles Rennie Mackintosh

THE 1925 EXHIBITION

In the era before television, themed trade fairs were the principal means of bringing new products and ideas to a large audience. The Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes held in Paris in 1925 was the greatest of the decade, attracting over 16 million visitors. It spilled across the greensward either side of the River Seine. All Paris’s leading department stores erected pavilions, as did the state-sponsored manufacturers of luxury goods that the exhibition set out to promote and which in the master plan by Charles Plumet were given the most prestigious locations. The foreign pavilions and those of the French regions and colonies squeezed on to the Right Bank. Critics praised the luxurious materials and monumental classicism of Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann; Süe et Mare and the pavilions of the Société des Artistes Décorateurs and L’Ambassade Française. The style survives in two original interiors at the Palais de la Porte Dorée, now the Cité Nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration, built in 1931 by Albert Laprade, Léon Jaussely and Léon Bazin. René Lalique’s exhibition of structural glassware was also admired, together with his illuminated fountain, Les Sources de France. Yet the overall assessment was one of disappointment.4 Many of the exhibits seemed over-encrusted with luxury or were downright cumbersome, not least those of the British Pavilion designed by Easton & Robertson. It resembled an escapee from its Palestine protectorate, a stripped-down and institutionalised colonialism.

Nevertheless, with unprecedented speed, many motifs from the more fantastic pavilions quickly found themselves transcribed to buildings and objects around the world. Fluted pylons, stripped classical orders implied by two or three horizontal lines, and variations on the giant sunburst over the entrance to the pavilion of the Galeries Lafayette or Lalique’s glass fountain are immediately recognised as ‘Art Deco’ today. In Britain, H.C. Bradshaw of the Department of Overseas Trade also noted how the ubiquitous plaster surfaces were finished in new ways, and how ‘silver and gold painted in lines or dusted over rough plaster surfaces gave brilliancy to many buildings’.5 Searchlights and waterworks contributed to a dream city that revealed itself at night when concealed coves of artificial lighting framed the buildings or picked out low-relief sculptural panels.

The United States did not participate in the Paris Exhibition, its government declaring that ‘American manufacturers and craftsmen had almost nothing to exhibit in the modern spirit’.6 This comment indicates the divergence between the architectural mainstream and the many small designers of the time with close links to Europe. These included émigrés such as Joseph Urban and Paul Frankl from Vienna, while Frank Lloyd Wright was pulling together European, Mayan and oriental sources in his work – albeit in relative obscurity at the lowest ebb of his long career. Links with the latest European thinking were reinforced by a competition for a skyscraper organised by the Chicago Tribune newspaper, which attracted 260 entries from both American and European designers in every variant of every traditional and modern style. The most influential was an unplaced modern design by Walter Gropius and Adolf Mayer, which featured three half bands at the top of the tower like an abstracted wing. This became a recurring motif, from its adoption by Robert Mallet-Stevens for the clock tower to the Paris Exhibition to that by Thomas Tait for a still larger tower at Glasgow’s Empire Exhibition as late as 1938.

Despite their government’s reticence, American designers and reviewers flocked to Paris in 1925, and the next year Charles Richards, director of the American Association of Museums, organised a tour of over 400 objects from the show. Other exhibits were displayed in major department stores across the United States as the economy soared. The building boom of 1925–30 saw the building of great cinemas, department stores and railroad stations, but most impressive of all were the new skyscraper office towers made possible by advances in steel construction, high-speed elevators, artificial lighting and air conditioning. Thirty major new offices were built in New York in 1926 alone, and the next years saw the building and decoration of the Chanin and Chrysler buildings, the most exotic skyscrapers of them all, set at kitty-corners in the mid-town grid transformed following the rebuilding of Grand Central Station for commuter traffic. Architects and their decorators plucked motifs from the objects sent over from Paris and out of photographs of the original pavilions; they further simplified or over-scaled classical motifs and enriched the colours of cubist patterns, semi-abstract forms and fountain motifs. As well as creating vibrant entrance halls and lift lobbies, there were unheralded opportunities for decoration at the tops of towers, subject in New York to a zoning ordinance that in 1924 began to enforce the stepping back of upper floors and led the architect Raymond Hood to christen Art Deco the ‘vertical style’. Hood’s Ideal House is one authentic piece of New York architecture in London, erected for the American Radiator Company as its European showroom.

Portois et Fix, Vienna, 1899–1900 by Max Fabiani

THE LONDON SCENE

The extensive rebuilding of Mayfair undertaken by the Grosvenor Estate between 1870 and 1914 had created an enclave of upmarket housing, shops and services in the heart of the West End, home to the London Season. The rebuilding of Claridge’s set the tone, as did its remodelling and extension amid changes to the area in the interwar years. The 1920s saw Britain’s aristocracy surrender their town houses for a pied-à-terre in a flat or one of the mews houses that replaced the old stable yards. Death duties forced the abandonment of Devonshire House in Piccadilly in 1919 and its demolition for a hotel, flats and an office block – the latter by the American firm of Carrère & Hastings. After five years of prevarication, Grosvenor House was torn down in 1927, and Aldford House followed in 1930, prompting the transformation of Park Lane with giant blocks of flats and hotels, a trend repeated around Grosvenor Square. Firms of decorators were engaged to deck out the new flats, some headed by society women such as Lady Sibyl Colefax and Syrie Maugham, who was celebrated for her white interiors and stripped furniture.

In place of the private mansions, hotels became centres for display. They accommodated not only the distinguished visitors arriving in increasing numbers off the great ocean liners, but also their ballrooms hosted the most prestigious events of the London Season. The Park Lane Hotel, its ballroom and foyer the finest example of Parisian Art Deco surviving in London, is on the site of a former Rothschild mansion and the Savile Club, both owned by the Rosebery family by the 1920s. When Joe