The thing I always think back to is listening to an interview with Patrick Nagel, where he described his own work as being a continuation of Art Deco and the stylistic heir to Erte. I know he started his thing back in the 1970s, but this Nagel is the image of the 80s to me: Rio, by Duran Duran.
Isn’t Nagel dead?
Yes, he is.
Still struggling to understand what you’re getting at, sorry.
I think you’re saying that Art Deco/Moderne was only possible because industry was still naive at that time. Nowadays, businessmen wouldn’t allow themselves to be dictated to by designers to such an extent, but in those days the limits of design vs. commerce had not yet been established.
Is that it?
Yes. Industrial designers - people like Loewy, Teague, Dreyfuss - were names, gurus, in those days. After marketing got more sophisticated, they were no more than contractors. Now they’re usually anonymous employees.
I’ve got a great Art Deco bridge that spans San Francisco to Marin that I’d like to sell you at cost for $35 million. I guarantee it will never go out of style.
I give you the Cincinnati Union Terminal Museum.
Once when visiting the museum I locked my keys in my car. Didn’t mind waiting for the lock smith to come by because of the view.
Link has pop-ups!
God, I hope not. It was fine for its time, but now (like its bastard stephild Googie) it just looks too retro. When you want to signal retrofuturism, it is to deco/streamline that designers seem to turn - see Meet The Robinsons. But all that gleaming chrome signals “past”, not “future” to me. *Metropolis *is a classic movie and all, but I wouldn’t want to live there.
I’d love for it to make a comeback. I could stare at the Chrysler Building all day long, and always take an afternoon in NYC just to concentrate on shooting it. There’s little flashes of it in & around San Francisco (plus there’s apparently some bridge), but it’s definitely not prevalent.
Bwa?
-Troy McClure SF, Castro resident.
Art Deco’s big, visible, lasting success was in architecture, not in consumer design (which is still considered important, if not done by “name” gurus). Architecture doesn’t even try for Art Deco anymore, and its impact on consumer products has faded in favor of much less mass-market goods. Different manufacturers offer their own brand of style and design, and you can still find art-deco-style products.
Marketing has become, not an anonymous number-crunching by faceless corporate shadows trying to leech money, but rather an integrated field of customer service and product support trying to find out what, since most of the tim they can’t coherently express it themselves. That is, comments like “marketing, which presumes to know what consumers want better than consumers themselves” are so ignorant as to be laughable.
I always wondered if there were any churches built in an Art Deco style. It seems to me that religious themes would be translatable into art Deco style-are there any such churches?
I don’t recall any.
I was always convinced that this was a church passing by it in I-95, and I’m not fully convinced that it’s not despite the fact it’s a museum 
Now whether or not it’s Deco is another question: on the other side of things if you made this more streamlined and metallic, it would have some Deco cred.
You may be touching on something valid here. The Marine Corps Museum was designed in an era when military service is strongly - if indirectly - associated with religious faith. This is so for political and cultural reasons, as well as the fact that we’re at war. The Corps also has a culture that means as much to its members as many organized religions do to their adherents.
It’s anything but.