Eugene Schoen was born in New York City in 1880. He studied architecture at Columbia University and graduated in 1901. During his summers as a student, he worked for McKim, Mead & White, gaining early exposure to elite architectural practice. After graduation, Columbia’s William R. Ware arranged a travel stipend for him and introduced him to the architect Otto Wagner. Wagner then introduced Schoen to Josef Hoffmann, one of the founders of the Wiener Werkstätte. That connection gave Schoen a direct encounter with Viennese modernism before he developed his own mature style. Around 1904, he began professional practice, first briefly working in the office of Robert W. Gibson. He soon became the partner of Swedish architect Axel S. Hedman in the firm Hedman & Schoen. Their commissions included synagogues, factories, theater work, and other architectural projects in and around New York. Even in these early years, Schoen showed an interest in combining classical structure with a more geometric and modern decorative language.

During World War I, when architectural work grew scarce, Schoen temporarily became general manager of his uncle’s International Oxygen Company in Newark. After the war, he returned to design and produced a series of branch banks for the Public National Bank of New York through the 1920s. The decisive turning point in his career came after he visited the 1925 Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes. Inspired by that fair, he opened an interior decorating gallery in New York and shifted much of his attention from architecture to interiors. There he designed furniture, lighting, rugs, and complete room settings in a distinctly American version of Art Deco, then often described as moderne. His work merged Viennese geometry with French elegance, and much of his furniture was produced by Schmieg, Hungate and Kotzian as highly refined one of a kind pieces. He was willing to use materials such as Fabrikoid, Flexwood, Monel, Bakelite, and polished metal to give his interiors a polished metropolitan modernity. Schoen became a visible figure in important exhibitions at Macy’s and the Metropolitan Museum, and he served on the cooperating committee for the Met’s 1929 show The Architect and the Industrial Arts. In 1930 Donald Deskey brought him in to design the interiors of the RKO Roxy at Rockefeller Center, a project praised at the time for its grace and refinement. His later commissions for hotels, showrooms, clubs, and the Cafritz house, along with signature pieces like his demilune chair and skyline inspired tables, confirmed his reputation as one of the most sophisticated American Art Deco designers, even earning him the nickname the American Ruhlmann.

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