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  #1  
Old Posted Jan 23, 2018, 9:40 PM
CaliNative CaliNative is offline
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Do you support a revival of Art Deco & Gothic Styles?

Call it neo-art deco & neo-gothic. Some major projects lately. Neo gothic USC village & at Yale U. too. The Harry Potter-Hogwarts & Gotham City look. How about neo-gothic & neo-art deco skyscrapers? Costs needn't be excessive. Much of the craft work can be automated to save costs with 3D printing etc. Would love to see a neo-deco tower in L.A. 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. Maybe too much of an eclectic style mish mash? Post modern mish mash had its critics and so may neo gothics & neo decos. But the art deco style especially was so beautiful so an attempt should be made.

Maybe we take architecture too seriously--Have some fun! The seven dwarfs caryatids holding up the animation building at Disney studios comes to mind.

Last edited by CaliNative; Jan 23, 2018 at 10:30 PM.
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  #2  
Old Posted Jan 23, 2018, 10:43 PM
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Of course
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  #3  
Old Posted Jan 24, 2018, 1:47 AM
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I would advocate for that. Especially in New York or LA, which both have grand examples of Art Deco. We are coming into 100 years since the 20s, which was when Deco was common.

I would also like to see skyscraper versions of the South Beach Art Deco style or streamline moderne style. A couple of these would have and still could help make the Miami skyline a real contender on the world stage.


Moderne by Van Swearingen, on Flickr
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  #4  
Old Posted Jan 24, 2018, 5:11 AM
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The Fitzroy?...
http://www.fitzroy.nyc/
http://www.romanandwilliams.com/the-fitzroy/
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/15/r...t-chelsea.html

I dont think the answer is a literal Art Deco revival but a fresh aesthetic with the DNA of Art Deco (blending classical/traditional with modern technology) thats not PoMo or turning back the clock to 1929. And by "fresh aesthetic" that doesnt necessarily mean all glass, odd form, carefully spaced "random" windows, all white or capital M Modernism, but rather something that just feels new and different.
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  #5  
Old Posted Jan 24, 2018, 2:47 PM
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I'm always in favor of architectural revivals, assuming high-quality materials are going to be used in construction. A real statue or ornamentation look good, but it just looks cheap if they're going to use styrofoam and fake stucco.

My own city's tallest is getting a "neo-deco" makeover that is well underway right now. We're going from this...



...to this.


Image source.
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  #6  
Old Posted Jan 24, 2018, 4:51 PM
Obadno Obadno is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by CaliNative View Post
Call it neo-art deco & neo-gothic. Some major projects lately. Neo gothic USC village & at Yale U. too. The Harry Potter-Hogwarts & Gotham City look. How about neo-gothic & neo-art deco skyscrapers? Costs needn't be excessive. Much of the craft work can be automated to save costs with 3D printing etc. Would love to see a neo-deco tower in L.A. 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. Maybe too much of an eclectic style mish mash? Post modern mish mash had its critics and so may neo gothics & neo decos. But the art deco style especially was so beautiful so an attempt should be made.

Maybe we take architecture too seriously--Have some fun! The seven dwarfs caryatids holding up the animation building at Disney studios comes to mind.
Absolutely yes,

Some of the new NYC supertalls 111 w 57th, DeKalb and others have a very cool neo-gothic look that I really like.
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  #7  
Old Posted Jan 24, 2018, 4:53 PM
Obadno Obadno is offline
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Originally Posted by hauntedheadnc View Post
I'm always in favor of architectural revivals, assuming high-quality materials are going to be used in construction. A real statue or ornamentation look good, but it just looks cheap if they're going to use styrofoam and fake stucco.

My own city's tallest is getting a "neo-deco" makeover that is well underway right now. We're going from this...



...to this.


Image source.
Massive improvement.

A little ornamentation goes a long way, it doesn't need to break the budget of a project to make all the difference.
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  #8  
Old Posted Jan 26, 2018, 6:25 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by CaliNative View Post
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.
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.
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  #9  
Old Posted Jan 26, 2018, 2:50 PM
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Well, there are already three buildings I know of that look like Art Deco Revival. 30 Park Place in New York looks like an authentic 1930s skyscraper, and 220 Central Park South is beginning to shape up and look like that. In Philly, the Mormons are building a new building called The Alexander, which also looks like it's from that era. Those are among my favorite buildings completed recently, so it's definitely a trend I'd like to see continue. As for Gothic, I posted yesterday that the redevelopment of the Tribune Tower is the perfect opportunity for a supertall that's a modern variation on Gothic architecture. For that, I wouldn't expect it to be the same materials as Tribune. More like a glass and steel supertall that uses the shapes from Gothic.
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  #10  
Old Posted Jan 27, 2018, 2:51 AM
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Quote:
Do you support a revival of Art Deco & Gothic Styles?
Absolutely if they used quality materials like stone and copper as well as actually implementing true deco / gothic design features and not just phoning it in.
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  #11  
Old Posted Jan 27, 2018, 8:39 PM
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square buildings look good if they look older or like the above pic. they should mix new non square buildings with square buildings that arnt boring looking. too much of one or the other doesnt look good imo
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  #12  
Old Posted Jan 29, 2018, 5:48 AM
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I'm genuinely intrigued by these newer "neo-deco" and "neo-gothic" designs and would love to see both styles make a strong comeback. However, if quality materials aren't used and the design isn't well executed, I can see these new structures be borderline laughable when completed. I guess time will tell.
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  #13  
Old Posted Feb 5, 2018, 2:34 AM
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art deco is unrivaled as the most beautiful styling of skyscraper. I love it to death.


statidc

sadly most neo art-deco is tacky (e.g., the pseudo Chrysler buildings lining the 401 in North York/Toronto, see link below).
https://www.google.ca/maps/@43.76374...7i13312!8i6656

The worst style is epitomized by the Conde-Nasty building in NYC: with the ugly turrets and forest of antennae on the roof. Fugly.


nyc arch
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