Streamline Moderne made bus stations and toasters look built for speed
In the 1930s designers took Art Deco, stripped off its ornament and borrowed the look of speed. Streamline Moderne gave buildings, trains, telephones and cars rounded corners, long horizontal lines and porthole windows, so that even a bus station could seem ready to sail. The French simply called it ocean liner style.
The style grew up during the Great Depression, when American industrial designers traded decoration for a clean, aerodynamic line suggesting simplicity, motion and speed. Many trace its public debut to the Century of Progress world's fair in Chicago in 1933–34. Earlier roots include the New Objectivity artists, Futurist architecture, and Erich Mendelsohn and Richard Neutra's 1923 remodelling of the Mossehaus in Berlin. Lean economic times shaped it too, and sharp angles gave way to simple curves.
France took its cue from the liner SS Normandie and named the style paquebot. The ship's first-class dining room, fitted out between 1933 and 1935, glowed from 38 internally lit columns plus twelve towering Lalique glass pillars, for this was the first style to build electric light into architecture. The foyer of London's Strand Palace Hotel, from 1930, was an early use of internally lit glass; saved by the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1969, it became the first Moderne interior kept in a museum.
Anything tied to travel wore the look most openly, from railway and bus depots to airports, harbour offices and highway diners, often white or pastel, with flat roofs, glass brick and chrome fittings. San Francisco's Aquatic Park Bathhouse, begun in 1936 by the Works Progress Administration, resembles a ship, and the Normandie Hotel in San Juan, opened in 1942, copies the liner's shape and displays its original sign. Houses in the style are rarer; the Lydecker House in Los Angeles is one.
Cars followed the same idea, sitting lower and wider with backward-tilted grilles and windscreens. The Tatra 77 of 1934 was the first mass-market streamlined car and the Chrysler Airflow, the same year, the second, while the 1934 Pioneer Zephyr launched Edward G. Budd's stainless-steel streamlined trains. In Europe, functionalism offered a contrasting modernism, chasing simple designs that working families could afford.
Source: Streamline Moderne
