Art & Statues
Art Deco New York
Art Deco New York
David Garrard Lowe's Art Deco New York traces how the style transformed the city's architecture, fashion, and design during the decades between the two world wars. Published by Watson-Guptill in 2004, the book pairs 80 color photographs with 150 duotone images across 214 pages, covering everything from Rockefeller Center to lesser-known buildings that carried the Deco style through the boroughs. Lowe extends the story beyond architecture into trains, automobiles, textiles, and film, showing how thoroughly the style shaped New York life during this period.
Lowe approaches Art Deco New York as a social history as much as an architectural one. He traces how the style moved through the city in the years following the First World War, taking hold not only in skyscrapers but in the interiors, furniture, and graphic design that filled daily life. The book gives equal attention to famous landmarks and overlooked buildings, showing how widely the Deco aesthetic spread across Manhattan and beyond.
The photography captures the machine-tooled precision that defined the era's architecture, from stepped facades to metal ornament and lobby detailing. Lowe pairs these images with an account of the era's cultural shifts, describing how the same forces that reshaped buildings also influenced fashion, transportation, and the emerging world of film and stage design. Interior views, including domestic spaces decorated in the period's residential styles, round out the book's coverage beyond commercial architecture.
Lowe writes with a historian's attention to detail and a genuine affection for the period, resulting in a book that reads as an engaging narrative rather than a straightforward catalog. His research draws connections between architecture and the broader political and social currents of interwar New York, giving context to why the Deco style resonated so strongly with the city at that moment. The result is a thorough look at one of the most architecturally significant periods in New York's history.
