The Architecture of New York's Art Deco Towers

The Chrysler Building, completed in 1930, remains the most exuberant expression of Art Deco ambition. Designed by William Van Alen, its stainless steel crown catches light at every hour, while its lobby of African marble transforms entry into ceremony. It was the world's tallest for eleven months before the Empire State Building surpassed it.

The crown's steel is Nirosta, a chrome-nickel alloy licensed from Krupp, and it has never needed more than washing. The spire beneath it was the building's trick: fabricated in sections inside the tower and kept hidden while the Bank of Manhattan building at 40 Wall Street was topped out, then raised through the roof and bolted into place in about ninety minutes in October 1929, adding fifty-six metres and ending the argument. The eagles projecting at the sixty-first floor are enlarged from Chrysler radiator ornaments.

Art Deco arrived in New York following the 1925 Paris exposition. American architects adapted the style to the unprecedented scale of Manhattan skyscrapers. The 1916 zoning resolution required setbacks that produced the stepped silhouettes defining the Deco skyline.

The stepped profile was a legal shape before it became a style. The 1916 zoning resolution set out how far a tower had to step back as it rose, and Hugh Ferriss drew the resulting envelope in a celebrated set of charcoal studies, collected in The Metropolis of Tomorrow in 1929. Architects were designing inside a volume that had already been sketched for them, which is why so many buildings of the period share a silhouette without sharing an author.

Rockefeller Center, completed between 1930 and 1939, represents Art Deco at urban scale. Its fourteen buildings create a city within a city. Lee Lawrie's sculptures and the commissioned artistic programme demonstrate the movement's ambition to integrate architecture with fine art.

Material richness distinguishes Art Deco from the austere modernism that succeeded it. Lobbies use exotic marbles, bronze, nickelled steel, and inlaid wood to create cinematic grandeur, expressions of corporate identity and civic aspiration during extraordinary economic confidence.

The craftsmanship has no contemporary equivalent. Ornamental metalwork, carved stone, and custom lighting were produced by specialised workshops from architects' detailed drawings. The Chrysler Building's eagles and the brickwork of One Hanson Place represent decorative handwork current economics cannot support.

New York's Art Deco heritage has been well preserved. The Art Deco Society organises tours revealing details invisible to hurried pedestrians, advocating for preservation of these landmarks.

The lobbies are the best of the inheritance and the least protected part of it. New York's landmarks law dates from 1965 and covers interiors only where they have been separately designated and are customarily open to the public, which is a small fraction of what exists, and a great deal was stripped in the decades either side. What survives repays the detour: the Chanin Building's bronze grilles and radiator screens on East 42nd Street, the Fred F. French Building's lobby on Fifth Avenue, and the restored Red Room at One Wall Street.

Visit https://www.artdeco.org for tour schedules. Look up. The Art Deco skyline, best appreciated by studying upper storeys most passersby ignore, represents an era when commercial architecture aspired to be art and occasionally achieved it.