Art Deco: the True International Style

media release: If you caught Robert Bruegmann’s program The Politics of Brutalism a couple years ago, then you won’t want to miss this one on Art Deco!

Campana Factory: Photo by Serhiii Chrucky

Art Deco was the true modern international style of the era between the two world wars. While most histories still try to argue that the mainline of the history of modernism is the history of avant grade designers like Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius, in fact their work was just a speck on the horizon compared to structures like Rockefeller Center in New York City, Hoover Dam near Las Vegas or Marine Drive in Bombay. Moving from a zig zag aesthetic in the 1920s to a more streamlined mode in the 1930s the Art Deco (actually the name only arrived in the 1960s) could be seen in everything from toasters and bicycles to suburban houses and the soaring set back towers of American city centers. 

Robert Bruegmann is an historian and critic of the built environment. He received his PhD in art history from the University of Pennsylvania in 1976 and since 1979 has been at the University of Illinois at Chicago where he is currently Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Art History, Architecture and Urban Planning. He has also taught at the Philadelphia College of Art, MIT and Columbia University. Among his books are Holabird & Roche and Holabird & Root, An Illustrated Catalogue of Work, 1991; The Architects and the City: Holabird & Roche of Chicago 1880-1918, 1998; Sprawl: A Compact History, 2005; The Architecture of Harry Weese, 2010, and, as editor, Modernism at Mid-Century, The Architecture of the United States Airforce Academy, 1995; and Art Deco Chicago: Designing Modern America, 2018. His main areas of research are in the history of architecture, urban planning, landscape and historic preservation.