Join us for a panel discussion on our book, Art Deco Chicago: Designing Modern America!

Art Deco Chicago, Designing Modern America is an expansive take on American Art Deco that explores Chicago's pivotal role in developing the architecture, graphic design, and product design that came to define middle-class style in the 20th century.  A panel discussion includes Joe Loundy, president of the Chicago Art Deco Society, Keith Bringe, former director of Unity Temple Restoration Foundation and director of CADS' Chicago Art Deco Survey from 2008-2015, Robert Bruegmann, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at UIC and editor of Art Deco Chicago, Victoria Matranga, Industrial Design Historian, Ruth K. Meyer, 20th Century Art Historian, and Frank Lipo, director of the Oak  Park River Forest History Museum.  

Frank Lloyd Wright’s lost Midway Gardens, the iconic Sunbeam Mixmaster, and Marshall Field’s famed window displays: despite the differences in scale and medium, each belongs to the broad current of an Art Deco style that developed in Chicago in the first half of the 20th century. This ambitious overview of the city’s architectural, product, industrial, and graphic design between 1910 and 1950 offers a fresh perspective on a style that would come to represent the dominant mode of modernism for the American middle class.

Lavishly illustrated with 325 images, the book narrates Art Deco’s evolution in 101 key works, carefully curated and chronologically organized to tell the story of not just a style but a set of sensibilities. Critical essays from leading figures in the field discuss the ways in which Art Deco created an entire visual universe that extended to architecture, advertising, household objects, clothing, and even food design.