Art Deco architecture: characteristics, examples, and the American cities that own the style

Architecture · 4 September 2026

Art Deco is the style of about 1920 to 1940: geometric, symmetrical, vertical, decorated with zigzags, chevrons, sunbursts and stylised figures, built in stone, terracotta, chrome and black glass. It was named after the 1925 Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs, but its capital is the United States, where it became the language of the skyscraper, the cinema, the diner and the dam in the decade between the boom of the 1920s and the Depression. The Chrysler Building (1930) and the Empire State Building (1931) are its most famous works, and Miami Beach has about 800 Deco buildings in a square mile. Below: the eight characteristics with the buildings that show each in the Buildings by style collection, the origins, the New York story, Miami and Streamline Moderne, the style around the world, and the differences from the styles it is confused with.

The eight characteristics

1. Vertical emphasis. Piers and window strips run up the facade without interruption; the building points at the sky. The Empire State's limestone piers and stainless-steel mullions run 1,250 feet.
2. Setbacks. The mass steps back in tiers as it rises, like a ziggurat, ending in a tower or crown. This is the New York silhouette.
3. Geometric ornament. Zigzags, chevrons, stepped forms, sunbursts, fountains frozen into stone, and stylised versions of nature: lotus, gazelle, eagle, wheat.
4. Symmetry. A central axis with matching wings; even Deco houses are symmetrical about the door.
5. New materials. Stainless steel and aluminium, chrome, Bakelite, Vitrolite black glass, polished granite and marble in contrasting colours, moulded terracotta and glazed brick in colour; neon at night.
6. Sculpture as part of the wall. Low-relief panels over doors and along cornices showing workers, machines, the elements, the zodiac: the reliefs of Rockefeller Center, the winged figures on the Chrysler's setbacks.
7. The crown. A distinctive top: the Chrysler's seven arched tiers of stainless steel with triangular windows, the Empire State's mooring mast, the gilded pyramid of the New York Life Building, the pineapple of the American Radiator Building.
8. Exotic borrowings. Egypt after Tutankhamun's tomb (1922), Aztec and Maya temples, Babylonian ziggurats, African and Asian pattern, all flattened into geometry.

Where it came from

Before the First World War, Vienna's Secession, Glasgow's Mackintosh and Paris's couturiers had already simplified Art Nouveau's curves into rectangles; the Ballets Russes brought hot colour and exotic pattern; Cubism and Futurism supplied the angles and the cult of the machine. The 1925 Paris exhibition gathered all of it into pavilions, furniture and jewellery; the United States sent no pavilion, because Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover said America had no modern decorative art to show, but sent a delegation that came back with the style. In America it fused with the skyscraper and with the streamlined industrial design of the 1930s. Art Deco overview.

New York and the zoning law

The shape of the Deco skyscraper was written by lawyers. The 1916 New York Zoning Resolution, passed after the 40-storey Equitable Building cast a seven-acre shadow, required tall buildings to step back from the street as they rose, following an angle from the property line, with an unlimited tower allowed on a quarter of the lot. Hugh Ferriss drew the maximum envelopes the law permitted, ziggurats of light and shadow, and architects built them: the Barclay-Vesey Building (1927), the Chanin Building (1929), the Chrysler Building (1930), the Empire State Building (1931), the Waldorf-Astoria, Rockefeller Center (1933–1939), 70 Pine Street. The Chrysler's crown was assembled inside the building and hoisted in secret in 1929 so that it would beat 40 Wall Street to the title of tallest in the world; it held it for eleven months until the Empire State, built in 410 days, passed it. Radio City Music Hall, the Chrysler lobby and the Empire State lobby are the interiors to see.

Miami Beach and Streamline Moderne

The Depression made Deco cheaper and rounder. Streamline Moderne, from about 1934, took its lines from trains, ships and aeroplanes: horizontal bands, curved corners, porthole windows, glass block, flat roofs with "eyebrows" over the windows, white stucco with pastel trim. Miami Beach was rebuilt in it after a 1926 hurricane and a 1930s tourist boom, and the Art Deco Historic District along Ocean Drive and Collins Avenue, about 800 buildings on one square mile, is the largest concentration of the style anywhere; the hotels have names like the Colony, the Carlyle and the Breakwater and neon on their fins. Streamline also gave America the diner, the bus station, the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Los Angeles shaped like a ship, and the Hoover Dam (1936), whose intake towers and terrazzo floors are Deco at the scale of a canyon.

Deco across America and the world

Every American city built at least one Deco tower in the late 1920s: the Guardian Building in Detroit with its Aztec-coloured lobby, the Carew Tower in Cincinnati, the Fisher Building, Union Terminal in Cincinnati with the largest half-dome in the Western Hemisphere, the Eastern Columbia and Bullocks Wilshire in Los Angeles, the Kansas City Power and Light Building, the Boston Avenue Methodist Church in Tulsa, the state capitols of Nebraska and Louisiana. Abroad: the Palais de Chaillot and the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris; the Bund and the Park Hotel in Shanghai; Napier in New Zealand, rebuilt entirely in Deco after the 1931 earthquake; Bombay's Marine Drive, the second-largest Deco district after Miami; the Chicago Board of Trade; and the ocean liners Normandie and Queen Mary, floating Deco palaces.

Art Deco vs Art Nouveau vs Modernism

• Art Nouveau (1890–1914) is curved, asymmetrical and organic, in wrought iron and glass; Deco is angular, symmetrical and geometric, in chrome and stone. Details in Art Nouveau vs Art Deco.
• Modernism and the International Style (1920s onward) reject ornament altogether: flat roofs, white walls, glass, no crown, no relief panels. Deco is modern in materials and decorative in intent; modernists dismissed it as "modernistic". After 1945 Deco vanished and modernism won; see mid-century modern architecture.
• Streamline Moderne is late Deco with the ornament removed and the corners rounded, closer to modernism but still decorative in its curves and bands.

The whole sequence is in architectural styles in chronological order.

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