100 years of Art Deco: a movement comes of age

Photographs by Adam Štěch

Adam Štěch has every architecture-lover’s dream job. The Prague-based magazine editor, curator and design historian spends a portion of each year travelling the globe, photographing 20th-century architecture – both celebrated icons and little-known gems – and posting the images on Instagram (@okolo_architecture). Over the years, he has taken more than 150,000 photos documenting over 10,000 buildings across 40 countries.

Some of these buildings are open to the public, but Štěch also makes direct contact with residents to gain access to private spaces. “I write emails and messages via social media, but often I have to send analogue letters by post, without a name, because the only thing I know is the address,” he says, speaking from a wood-panelled bar in the Czech capital. His followers appreciate this unique access, he says, as well as his perspective: “I look at the buildings not as a photographer, but as a historian.”

This summer marks the 100th anniversary of the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts), a colossal fair that took over 57 acres in central Paris and which gave the Art Deco movement its name. To celebrate the milestone, Štěch told us the stories behind his images of some of his favourite buildings from the Art Deco period around the world. These photos take us from São Paulo to Tokyo to Budapest, and reveal how Art Deco architecture shape-shifted as it travelled across the globe and reached its zenith in the US in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Hear the words “Art Deco” and most of us automatically think of the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age, the New York City skyline dominated by the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings. It feels unmistakably American. Yet the roots of the movement began much earlier, in France. The 1925 Expo was meant to take place in 1914, but was delayed for over a decade by the First World War. “It’s easy to look at the 1920s in isolation as this giddy party time,” Zorian Clayton, curator of prints at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, told me. “But the context is that it follows the trauma of the war, so it’s really about rebuilding the world, and asking in whose image it should be rebuilt.”

By 1925, this idea of “rebuilding the world” was contested territory. The goal for the French in hosting the Expo was to reassert their country as the pinnacle of taste, design, fashion and style in the postwar age. But they had a fairly rigid idea of what they wanted that taste to be. The organising committee tried to disallow a pavilion designed by Le Corbusier, the Swiss-French architect and designer, considering it too austere and stark. Le Corbusier, who would become one of the leaders of the Modernist movement, said of the fair: “Decorative art, as opposed to the machine phenomenon, is the final twitch of the old manual mode, and is a dying thing. Our pavilion will contain only standard things created by industry in factories and mass-produced.”

In many ways, Le Corbusier had the last laugh. When the Second World War started and austerity began to bite across Europe, Art Deco was “looked down upon and seen as extremely over-decorated,” Clayton said. Its associations with luxury and leisure were out of step with the prevailing mood. Even today, while Modernism of the Corbusian variety is generally revered, Art Deco is sometimes seen as frivolous and unserious.

Yet a century on from the 1925 Expo in Paris, it’s clear that Art Deco made its mark in a profound way. “Over the course of just a few decades, it pumped out these extraordinary, rather fabulous creations,” Clayton told me. The style also travelled around the world. Today you can see Art Deco’s influence not just in Europe and North America but in India, North Africa, Latin America and Australasia. “It’s amazing how rapidly it goes around the world and how each region has its own way of interpreting it,” Clayton said. “It’s truly a global style.”

At the same time, Art Deco impacted design and art across virtually every medium imaginable. “It influences fashion, jewellery, car design, furniture, architecture, graphic design, theatre, film and painting,” said Clayton. “Basically everything.” And, as these photographs by Štěch remind us, arguably the biggest and most enduring impression left by Art Deco was on our cityscapes and the built environment: the apartment buildings we live in, the doorways we walk through, the skyscrapers we gaze up at.

The Modernist Travel Guide by Adam Štěch’s is published by Sight Unseen at £29 (shop.sightunseen.com)