[.ca] American Art Deco (ISBN 0393019705)

Glorious deco detail.:
Architectural photographer Carla Breeze has focussed her camera on the best seventy-five Art Deco buildings across the Nation and produced a glorious book of color photos that perfectly captures the style. I really liked this book because she concentrates on the architectural detail of each building (with 450 photos) and in many cases, when this detail is on the outside, it is just not viewable from the ground. The introduction has an interesting eighteen-page photo section dealing with materials, metal, concrete, terra cotta, mosaic, glass, wood and stone. I found this very useful when looking at the images. Each building starts on the spread (some, rightly, have more pages) with a street address and some background text and captions for the photos. The elegant layout does not interfere with the wonderful buildings (a tip of the hat to book designer Robert Wiser) could anyone do anything to improve the photo of the stunning Niagara Mohawk Power headquarters in Syracuse on page seventy-three. To complement this lovely book have a look at 'Rediscovering Art Deco USA' by Barbara Capitman, Michael Kinerk and Dennis Wilhelm, a methodical nationwide survey, though it does concentrate on commercial buildings rather than houses. If you are Deco spotting on the road leave a space in the glove compartment for David Gebhard's excellent 'The National Trust Guide to Art Deco in America', if it's not in this book then most likely it's not worth looking at.