Seattle Art Deco

I admit it. I was sensitized to architecture after my trip to Tulsa. I discovered a love of buildings of a certain age, and once you know what you are looking for, you start to see evidence of your new found love around every corner. But Seattle is not my discovery. The National Park Service has a tour on their web site for 37 historically interesting buildings in Seattle (link provided), and many of them are in the downtown area. I was in Seattle for the American Cheese Society annual meeting, and managed to spend enough time outside walking to fall in love with the architecture of the city.

Where to start. Well, as is almost always the case, where you are is as good a place as any, and I bet within a block of where you are you will find a building that will touch your fancy.
What is deco? Here are a few ideas of others about what to look for. What it is and what it is not.
Whether curvy or angular, 1920s or 1930s, certain overall principles can be identified in art deco design:
• This was the art of the machine age and all that this implied: It was about power, about speed, and about the (then) new. It was a style that adapted to machine-made production as well, giving the common man access to mass-produced facsimiles of more expensive handcrafted goods.

• This was the style of popular glamour. Hollywood broadcast this style to the world, and the world bought it. And loved it. And wanted more.
• It expressed a certain optimism and excitement about the modern age. This optimism even held through the depression years of the 1930s when streamline styling began experimenting with “futurism.” Futuristic-deco promised even better things to come (think Flash Gordon or the 1939 New York World’s Fair).
• It explored a fascination with geometry. Gone were the strict architectural interpretations of classic Greco-Roman forms. Gone too were any designs directly depicting nature. These were replaced by often richly layered repetitions of geometric forms. Any figural forms that did find their way onto the sides of buildings were usually flattened to their geometric essence, much like cubist paintings. Geometric designs of native peoples were also common motifs in this period. In the 1930s, architects began experimenting with eliminating ornament altogether, relying on the geometrical shapes of the building’s construction to speak for the inherent beauty of the structure. These “modern” and “international style” buildings were the bridge from deco to the more austere modern style, which developed after World War II.