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Originally Posted by CaliNative
The only question I have is the current wrap around windows...can we bring back individual windows? Hard to figure out wrap around windows in a neo gothic. May work in a neo deco.
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What you're talking about is called a curtain wall. Curtain walls are non-load bearing facades which attach to the edges of the floor slabs. They're called curtain walls because it's like you're hanging a window curtain off the slabs. Curtain walls can either be stick built (built out of smaller parts, in place), or they can be unitized (meaning an entire section of facade is manufactured in a factory, and then basically clipped onto the building). Curtain walls can have stone panels, and they don't always have the stereotypical glassy appearance. But big stone piers are too heavy for the hardware to hold.
There are also precast concrete facades. These are similar to unitized curtain walls in that they are sections of facade that are made in a factory and then attached to the side of the building. They can be very sculptural, and it wouldn't be super hard to do the kind of layering that art deco facades have. You can also embed brick or stone veneer onto the surface. Also, concrete is basically cast limestone, and even actual art deco buildings sometimes use concrete to simulate limestone.
But I don't think that is the hard part about doing this. The problem is that the different facade units have gaps between them. You can't have an entire skyscraper facade only have super fine joints.
It's not that we've gotten too cheap to do it the way they did in the 1920s, but rather in the 1920s they didn't know or care enough about the problems involved. Facades expand and contract when they change temperature, so you need expansion joints. Even more so when the facade has a lot of elaborate and uneven parts, which create stress points. Air pressure can push water into the wall. The elaborate facades create ledges that water may not properly drain off. When it does drain off it might stain the facade because they didn't put in drip edges. If you look at close up photos of old buildings, they're covered in cracks. You can look at midcentury photos too. Only a few decades after being built the facades were falling apart.
For small facades you can basically do whatever (although the bigger they get the more expansion joints come into play). But for tall buildings I don't have the personal technical knowledge to know how the gaps would be solved.
But aside from the technical aspects there's the question of whether it is a good thing to do. What exactly do medieval religious buildings have to do with today's corporate hqs and condo highrises?
Art deco is more transferrable. Art deco was modernistic/futuristic (borderline sci-fi), it fully embraced technological advancement as a cultural value, it fully embraced advances in building technology and flaunted them. It's sexy, it's decadent. It's about sculptural form-making (even if under the pretense of rationality). But it did all of it within the existing architectural paradigm. They didn't so much create a new, modern architecture, they simply added a futuristic style to their assortment of ancient styles. Banks got neoclassical, and telephone exchanges got art deco.
The current day equivalent of art deco is Zaha Hadid. And even the reaction against that kind of architecture is the same reaction that was had against art deco at the time.
But for making new art deco, celebrating the invention of the radio and the motorcar is just too anachronistic to take seriously. Studying art deco buildings and learning about their massing and facade compositions, how different kinds of details and forms were used to resolve various aesthetic problems. How light and shadow falls. Material choices. An option might be to use that knowledge to make a building that has positive qualities but isn't specifically art deco.