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1663-34 Art Deco/Preservation 00009785 SUN DEC 13 1987 ED: FINAL SECTION: HOME & DESIGN PAGE: 13H LENGTH: 54 . 99" LONG ILLUST: photo: SENATOR HOTEL, EMPIRE STATE BUILDING SOURCE: DAVID M. MAXFIELD Smithsonian News Service DATELINE: MEMO: RETAINING A PIECE OF THE PAST HELD VITAL FOR FUTURE SAVING A PIECE OF THE PAST SEEN VITAL FOR FUTURE OLD BUILDINGS AND GOODS ARE DECO-ERA TREASURES Winning historic landmark status for a streamlined Greyhound bus station or collecting a 1937 Electrolux vacuum cleaner might seem curious indeed to preservationists who years ago saved the fine old homes and furnishings once owned by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. But the rush now to protect a dwindling stock of architecturally significant early 20th Century buildings and to collect and exhibit scarce consumer goods from the 1920s and ' 30s is considered an equally compelling task by a number of Americans. As one architect recently said of the Greyhound station in Washington, D.C. , "There aren't many buildings from this period left, partly because there wasn' t much construction being done as the country was coming out of the Depression. If we save it now, 25 or 50 years from now we will be glad we did. " Miami Beach' s collection of Moderne seaside hotels, painted in tropical pastels and sporting symbols of the sea and shore, struck a note of optimism in the Depression years of the 1930s. The South Beach area, now a national historic district, drew Americans "who didn' t know where they were headed, " recalled Leicester Hemingway, Ernest ' s brother and a Miami resident. "But they wanted something modern . . . so they smoothed everything until you got the feeling that life was smooth. The buildings made you happy to be here. " Today, a variety of items from the Deco decades, things like chromium cocktail shakers and jazzy Bakelite jewelry, have taken on popular roles of "kitsch" or "camp. " However, the aggregate outpouring from the nation' s factories in the earlier era was anything but superficial. The new goods changed -- and enlivened -- the face of American life, making their preservation especially meaningful. Fueling that change was the machine. In the years between the world wars, "America' s artists, designers and public struggled to acknowledge, understand, accept and finally control the machine-driven world, " Brooklyn Museum Director Robert T. Buck noted during the museum' s recent exhibit, The Machine Age. "These goals, " he said, "prepared the way for America' s political, economic and artistic leadership in the 1940s and 1950s. " The machine presence was felt everywhere after World War I -- from the jangle of the bedside alarm to the late night sign- off on the new console radio. In some circles, houses were thought of as "machines for living, " and humans themselves were viewed as mechanisms with the dawn of "time-motion" studies that clocked worker efficiency. Busby Berkeley choreographed his showgirls in forms resembling aircraft engines. Carl Sandburg wrote Smoke and Steel. Vogue magazine in 1934 dictated that to be fashionable a woman' s "profile will have the windswept fleet lines of a speedboat or aeroplane. " Machinery, of course, had been heavily relied upon since the early decades of the 19th Century, but Americans tended to keep their distance, trusting in rural values, in historical and biblical traditions. "The machine was just seen as a way of getting something done, " historian Richard Guy Wilson, a contributor to the Brooklyn show, told a Smithsonian Resident Associates class on Art Deco. According to Wilson, that perception changed with World War I, because the victory of the Allies was in a sense a machine victory, the force that tipped the balance this way. Despite the war' s destruction, "people were impressed by the new machine, and it brought a consciousness that we were in a new age, " Wilson said. Soon after the war, the machine felt right at home for the first time, moving into the kitchen, the laundry and the bath, but leaving, for the moment, the rest of the house "traditional. " The reputation of these engines of change was refined even more by artists who saw in them a glow of romance. The photographer Margaret Bourke- White, for one, made many look twice when she saw that "dynamos were more beautiful than pearls. " Yet the overreaching question in the ' 20s was whether it was possible to make a genuine culture out of industrialization. Could there be, as one designer wrote, "a new style as right and satisfying and as true to our time as Gothic was to the Middle Ages?" The answer was Art Deco, the name given the jazzy, angular, flamboyant designs of the ' 20s as well as the smoother, rounded, organic style of the ' 30s, sometimes also referred to as "Streamline Moderne. " Though the names vary with historians, Art Deco "became pervasively popular in the United States, redefining and even revolutionizing every area of the fine and decorative arts, " said Alastair Duncan, who consulted on a display of Deco objects at the Smithsonian' s Renwick Gallery in Washington. The modern look worked its way into every corner of the country, conveyed by new networks of bus and air terminals, roadside diners, radio station chains and eventually by federal buildings. Designs that originated in Paris, then traveled to New York, turned up on factories in San Diego, stores in Seattle, churches in Tulsa. Paris in 1925, already aswirl with the talk of modern art, staged the huge "Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes, " from which came the terms Deco and Moderne and design trends for years to come. For nations exhibiting in the City of Light, however, there was a strict guideline: "Works admitted to the Exposition must show new inspiration and real originality. . . . Reproductions, imitations and counterfeits of ancient styles will be strictly prohibited. " Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover felt that the United States could not meet the requirements, but not to miss out entirely, he sent 108 observers from the art and construction professions. What they saw along the Champs-Elysees looked familiar to some -- Coney Island' s gaudiness -- although one art critic put it charitably when she compared the expo' s "cubistic shapes and futurist colors" to a Picasso abstraction. Back home, department stores such as Macy' s and Lord & Taylor as well as major museums began to see possibilities in the new style. Macy' s, with its own manifesto of 1928 -- "It is ridiculous to tolerate all these old styles. . . . We must break the habit" -- engineered a show of 500 objects from six nations, lasting just two weeks . America was hooked. So were the nation' s designers. Teapots took on the look of new skyscrapers; jewelry to be worn in snazzy new nightclubs shimmied with jagged designs and feverish colors; furniture, textiles, book covers, fast cars, luxury liners -- everything was freed from the look of the past. Machine-based Deco designs that stick in mind alongside flappers and bearskins represent more than handsome images. They mirror the spirit of the postwar ' 20s, a time of transition, dislocation, hope and fear. As Brooklyn Museum curator Dianne Pilgrim observed, "There was an uneasiness in the air, a restlessness, but also an exuberance, expressed in the art of the period with zig-zags, lightning bolts, cubist and geometric designs, verticality and stepped contours. " Plant, sun and cloud motifs wer among other nature symbols adapted to Art Deco. At the Chrysler Building' s spire, tiers of triangular windows pointed to the heavens like sun rays, while terraces, with the pragmatic American in mind, recalled interlocking gears . Elsewhere, Aztec or primitive American Indian symbols, chosen for their machinelike repetitive patterns, co-existed with Buck Rogers sci-fi details, references to the ancient past and the distant future during the uncertain present. Abstract symbols of bubbling fountains etched in new expanses of plate glass and sumptuous modern metals suggested redemption in a world of broken values that Hemingway and others addressed after World War I . But that bubble was again about to burst. It was 1929 . Along with the stock market, the set-back skyscraper, an icon of the ' 20s, toppled in status; the newly completed Empire State Building, much of its space unrented, was scorned as the Empty State Building. Exotic Mayan motifs covering movie marquees and interiors, where audiences munched on pure escape, crumbled, replaced by simpler, smoother, streamlined shapes in the ' 30s, which seemed to soothe frayed nerves. That reason alone could serve for saving other treasures from the Deco decades. ST. 197 -- WK. (47 ) -86 ADDED TERMS: END OF DOCUMENT.