In 1927, automobile titan Walter P. Chrysler hired architect William Van Alen to build the world’s tallest skyscraper—a title the Chrysler Building held for 339 days. Though it’s one of the most iconic Art Deco buildings in the world, McGuire says that it’s “partly a modern interpretation of Gothic Revival architecture.” It’s perhaps best known for the stainless steel Gothic spire with triangular glass windows—arranged as radial sunbursts to emphasize its setback arches—atop the skyscraper’s tower, she explains. The building’s other notable nod to Gothic architecture is its stainless-steel eagle “gargoyles” looking out from the edges of the 31st and 61st floors, McGuire notes.

Still, the Chrysler Building “perhaps best epitomizes the glamour and exuberance of the Art Deco era,” says Kathleen Murphy Skolnik, an architectural historian. It celebrates the automobile with a frieze of stylized racing cars in gray and white brick with polished steel hubcaps, and radiator caps protruding from the corners at the 31st floor, she notes. “Since the public was just beginning to absorb the impacts of the Great Depression, the building made an argument for corporate capitalism as a possible way out of economic turmoil,” McGuire explains.

The first Chicago Board of Trade building was completed in 1885, and deemed structurally unsound in the 1920s. In 1925, the Chicago Board of Trade commissioned architects Holabird & Root to design the current building, which opened its doors on June 9, 1930. 

According to Skolnik, the structure is a "superb example" of the application of Chicago’s 1923 zoning ordinance. This ordinance allowed buildings in the downtown area to rise above a maximum height of 264 feet, as long as portions were set back from the street. The result is a building with a tapered silhouette that culminates in a tower with a pyramid-shaped roof.

The top of the building features a highly stylized cast aluminum sculpture of Ceres, the Roman goddess of grain and agriculture, designed by John Storrs. “The dramatic three-story lobby features cascades or waterfall motifs of black and buff colored marble and a large back lit panel extending the full length of the ceiling,” Skolnik says.

Completed in 1930 and located on Monument Circle in downtown Indianapolis, Circle Tower features setback construction resembling a wedding cake, shaped by local height restrictions. “The lower 10 stories of Circle Tower rise to 108 feet, and the last four stories are recessed in terraces resembling ziggurat pyramids of Ancient Sumer in Mesopotamia,” says James Glass, an Indianapolis-based architectural historian. The upper terraces and a two-story crown atop the tower feature Art Deco-style sculptures.

The Circle Tower lobby is an example of the Egyptian Revival seen through the lens of modernistic eclecticism—a design motif that rose to popularity following the 1922 discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb, McGuire explains. It features geometric patterns, contrasting colors and gold ornamentations. “Although nothing in the lobby actually mimics authentic, ancient Egyptian design, the abstracted Egyptian motifs and color references create spaces of revivalist fantasy,” she says.

During its heyday, Art Deco design and ornamentation could even be found on key pieces of infrastructure, like bridges, power plants and the Hoover Dam. The four intake towers of the Hoover Dam, completed in 1936, have dominant vertical lines, a bit like the abstracted Gothic Revival seen in many skyscrapers of the era, McGuire explains.

Oskar Hansen’s Art Deco bas-reliefs in the inner circulation zones depict the dam’s functions of providing flood control and electricity to the region. According to McGuire, the art tells visitors a story of what the dam meant for American society in the Great Depression. In addition to referencing local Indigenous history, plants and animals, they also make the case that engineering can triumph over nature’s unpredictability. “In this way, the design offered a ray of hope that technology might propel the country out of its economic and social chaos,” she says.

Located in downtown Tulsa, Boston Avenue United Methodist Church was under construction from 1924 until 1929. Though it’s considered one of the most striking Art Deco places of worship in the country, the church’s design is rooted in Chicago modernism, McGuire says, and heavily influenced by the work of architects Frank Lloyd Wright and his mentor, Louis Sullivan. 

The design of Boston Avenue United Methodist Church was a collaboration between architect Bruce Goff and Adah Robinson, chair of the art department at the University of Tulsa. According to McGuire, there has been ongoing controversy over who designed the various aspects of the church. 

“Goff may have drawn on popular 1920s styles, like its vertical, triangular forms, which align it with burgeoning Art Deco Gothic Revival,” she explains. “Robinson may have been responsible for significant elements of the church’s ornamentation, but the overall forms are 100 percent Goff’s interpretation of Wright and Sullivan’s turn of the 20th century American modernism.”

Griffith Observatory opened its doors in 1935 on the south slope of Mount Hollywood overlooking Los Angeles. “The observatory is a wonderful example of how California Art Deco buildings are often a combination of a purified version of the Beaux-Arts style—which incorporates features from classical Greek and Roman architecture—and the Spanish Colonial Revival, which became popular across California after the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco,” McGuire says.

Because it was built during the Great Depression—when goods and labor cost less than usual—the highest quality materials were used on the building’s interior and exterior, making it especially durable. “As a building devoted to science, it has little exterior ornamentation apart from an oversized Greek key pattern, which is an example of the ways that 1930s architects abstracted or resized patterns drawn from ancient classical sources,” McGuire says. Additionally, six sculptors were employed through a New Deal art program to create the Astronomers Monument: a large, outdoor concrete sculpture on the observatory’s front lawn.

Completed in 1939, the Miami Beach Post Office is an example of a style of Art Deco architecture known as “Streamline Moderne,” which favors sleek, clean lines and machinelike, transportation-inspired forms over excessive ornamentation. The building is an elegant design featuring two wings that extend diagonally from a central cylinder with a conical roof and thin, cylindrical cupola, Skolnik explains. 

Gold metallic post office boxes line the interior of the cylinder, along with three New Deal murals depicting “Episodes from the History of Florida” by Works Progress Administration artist Charles Russell Hardman. “The entry cylinder has a vivid, jade green ceiling accentuated with a central golden sunburst around a lighting fixture that resembles something both celestial and technological,” McGuire says. “The architectural effect is almost like visiting a modern ‘temple of mail.’”

When construction began on Cincinnati Union Terminal in August 1929, a traditional Beaux-Arts style building had been planned. But after the stock market crash two months later, costs had to be cut, and the design was simplified, Skolnik says. French-born architect and industrial designer Paul Philippe Cret joined the project in the early 1930s as a design consultant and is responsible for the terminal's revised Streamline Moderne design, she explains. The structure was completed in 1933. 

“The exterior of the terminal is not lavish, but it is dramatic and monumental and certainly modern,” Skolnik says. “The façade is dominated by an immense semicircular arch containing nine vertical bands of windows and an enormous clock with hands outlined in red neon.”   

The interior is filled with vibrant color. Art Deco details can be seen in the architectural fixtures, the furnishings and the light fixtures in the terminal, Skolnik notes. Among the highlights are glass mosaics by German-born artist Winold Reiss, which depict the development of Cincinnati.  

“As one of the most compelling examples of collaborative Art Deco architecture in the U.S., it represented a remarkable unification of modern technology with modern art and was an ideal synthesis between classicism and modernism,” McGuire says.

New York architect Bertram Goodhue’s 1920 design for the Nebraska Capitol Building is an example of how American interpretations of the French Beaux-Arts style were instrumental in developing popular Art Deco modern architecture, McGuire says.

Goodhue rejected the standard approach to the design of state capitol buildings by replacing the usual monumental dome with a soaring 400-foot vertical domed tower, Skolnik explains. He also avoided overt historical ornamentation—flattening three-dimensional sculptural forms into bas-reliefs referencing politics, world history, geography and Indigenous iconography. 

“Because of its combination of conservative classicism and modernistic design innovations, Art Deco was a somewhat progressive style,” McGuire says. “But it was not too progressive: a fact that was very important to most Americans in this period. The capitol struck an architectural balance between the two poles that would have appealed to Nebraska’s mostly rural populace.”