Cowtown Moderne: Art Deco Architecture of Fort Worth, Texas - Hardcover

Cohen, Judith Singer

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0890963134 ISBN 13: 9780890963135

Publisher: Texas A & M Univ Pr, 1988

Synopsis

The rise of Art Deco paralleled the booming growth of Fort Worth. Barely two generations after its founding as a frontier fort, the city where the West begins erupted with entrepreneurs, professionals, and tall buildings that were veritable shrines to big business. The aura of success lent by New York's big new skyscrapers in the Zigzag Moderne style, as the preliminary phase of Art Deco is known, led southwestern tycoons to construct similarly extravagant buildings. The stock market crash brought that first phase of Art Deco to a quick close. Fort Worth, doing its best to stave off the worst of the Great Depression, built an array of more austere public structures in the second phase of Art Deco -- the Classical or PWA Moderne Style. In the Fort Worth neighborhoods that grew up in the thirties, there are many extant commercial and residential structures of the last Art Deco phase -- the Streamline Moderne. This work is organized in three Part I. Introduction gives a brief history of Cowtown and Moderne and brief biographies of the architects; Part II. Early Art Deco in Fort Worth covers the roaring twenties and Fort Worth's Zigzag Moderne buildings; Part III. Late Art Deco in Fort Worth covers the Depression years and Fort Worth's Classical/PWA Moderne buildings. 181 illustrations from photographs accompany the text.

Edition details

• Publisher: Texas A & M Univ Pr
• Publication date: 1988
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0890963134
• ISBN 13: 9780890963135
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 202