American art deco Architecture and regionalism

This handsome photographic survey of American Art Deco architecture is a wonderful addition to the literature on Art Deco. Breeze, an architectural photographer and author of previous books on various aspects of Art Deco, arranges her survey geographically. Regionalism is a major theme and, throughout, she notes local sources for ornamental motifs. She is particularly interested in the influence of Native American design on Art Deco decorative programs. Breeze avoids one of the common frustrations in publications devoted to architecture: the limitation of illustrations to one or two general views of a building. Instead, she focuses on a handful of buildings from each region and provides generous interior as well as exterior views and artfully chosen details from the building's decorative programs. Also noteworthy is her effort to include religious as well as civic and commercial examples of the style. The result is a perceptive and visually rewarding documentation of the subject, beautifully produced. Endnotes. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. All levels. D. P. Doordan University of Notre Dame

This photographic survey of Art Deco architecture and interiors in the United States is the most impressive this reviewer has seen to date. It exhibits more than 500 resplendent color photographs of the nation's most popular samples of Jazz Age style, dating from the 1920s to the 1950s, all taken by Breeze, one of the country's foremost architectural photographers. Breeze has also written the text, emphasizing the meaning of Art Deco as an American fusion of geometry, mechanolatry, materiality, and nationality, including nativist cultures. Before European modern architecture of the 1920s blew out the candles on the Beaux Arts wedding cake of design in the mid-20th century, Art Deco was America's leading public and commercial style, featured in post offices, city halls, movie palaces, apartment houses, and department stores all over the country. It was a "people's" style-traditional, ornamental, communicative, and reassuring-and this book will do a lot to retain and revive interest in it. Recommended for all architecture collections.-Peter S. Kaufman, Boston Architectural Ctr. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.