Word: deco
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...dream palace, an exuberant art deco fantasy, but year after year fewer people came. Despite its exalted status as a temple of family entertainment and the "Showplace of the Nation," Manhattan's Radio City Music Hall would have closed if a few changes had not been made. And what changes they were! Where Snow White once graced the screen, Madonna has become a queen of the stage. In the hall where the movie King Kong premiered, the closest thing to a horror show these days is a concert by the shockrock group Twisted Sister. In addition to the high-kicking...
...home to set up a deluxe sweatshop complete with mirrored walls, sophisticated weight-lifting devices and a chrome rack that contains rows of dumb-bells. A whirlpool tub is in the bath next door. The $100,000 price tag also bought style: the entire suite is done in art deco. Working out, says Dumont, 55, an investment banker, "is a lot better at home...
Much of 20th century American design seems to have been animated by two competing impulses. One is a kind of mannered childishness, a sometimes arch toymaker's instinct that produced the streamlined gadgetry of late art deco, the Day-Glo plastics of Pop, the high-tech doodads and joke furniture of today. The other is a reformist urge. When not fashioning playthings, designers turn grave, producing furniture and other objects that are neo- Puritan, high-minded. The severe geometries of Frank Lloyd Wright's turn- of- the-century interiors and Steven Holl's beautiful side chair (1984), for example...
With the grim war-machine realities of World War II, however, American designers' speculation about the shape of things to come turned away from a boyish faith in gadgets and toward a kind of timeless, spacy mysticism. In the late 1940s streamlining and art-deco angularity were abandoned in favor of more approximate, biomorphic forms from nature--lamps shaped like bubbles, coffee tables shaped like amoebas. Too bad. The slick Radio City elegance had been a bit hokey, but at least each object made obvious sense: hard angles, parallel lines and parabolas are precise, mathematically simple. Except for the work...
Other small miracles abounded. In the city's Colonia Roma district, a residential area adorned with scatterings of art nouveau and art deco architecture, Ramona Saldana Martinez, 30, described her survival after the collapse of a six-story apartment building. She and two of her children were removed from the wreckage after 22 hours. Said Martinez: "My mother died instantly. My twelve-year-old son also died. The wall and the ceilings came down on us, but I could breathe. I stripped some wallpaper to let the air come...