Art Deco Chicago – the Field Building

The Field Building was designed by the Chicago firm of Graham, Anderson, Probst & White (GAP&W), architects of the Wrigley Building and Merchandise Mart and constructed between 1931 and 1934. It would be the last major building completed in the city for 20 years, thanks to the Depression and Second World War. The Field was the climax of GAP&W’s journey from a florid Beaux Arts style to Art Deco, via the unadorned functionalism of the Merchandise Mart. The lavish, extravagant decor featured in the 1925 Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs had made its way to the prairielands of the Mid West. A recent publication tells the story.

From the outside the Field Building is a bit of a brute – a massive 45 storey central slab with four 22 storey towers - one at each corner. Its reputation as an exemplar of Art Deco in architecture rests on the treatment of the circulation areas inside the building. A polished black granite surround to a soaring entrance that rises up to the 4th. floor is a foretaste of what lies within. Reflective marble and Terrazzo surfaces line the corridors, vertical light splashes from purpose built uplighters mark the route while fluted cladding draws the eye upwards. The progress of the high speed elevators can be monitored from the display panel in the lobby, formed in the shape of the building. Embedded in the panel is a brass finish US mailbox complete with Art Deco fonts and American Eagle. A public walkway connects Clark and LaSalle Streets – an overhead footbridge with an exquisitely detailed Art Deco clock face has a mirrored underside that adds to the sense of theatre. The materials, surfaces, finishes and trims were chosen to flatter the corporate client with their luxury value. The general effect is more restrained than, say, the Moscow Metro but it’s a step in that direction. Its completion ironically coincided with the lowest point in the Great Depression which, unlike the one we’re living through now, brought speculative and prestige development to an abrupt standstill.

Great Railway Stations No. 13: Gare de Lens

Coal mining was the major activity for over a century in the medium sized town of Lens in Northern France but none of it remains today. Like many similar towns and cities in Britain it has struggled to find a new role for itself. In an effort to attract tourism, an annex of the Louvre (Louvre-Lens) opened in 2012. The gallery displays a selection of artworks brought from Paris for a provincial vacation. Visitor numbers have fallen from 900,000 in the first year to 450,000 in 2017 which suggests the Bilbao-effect is fading fast. Some of these visitors will have arrived by train in which case it’s to be hoped they had a good look at the station buildings or they would have missed one of France’s most distinctive and eccentric station buildings.

The present Gare de Lens was designed and built 1926-27 by architect, Urbain Cassan (1890 - 1979). Cassan also designed stations for Senlis, Brest and Saint-Quentin and later was involved in the design for the Tour Montparnasse (1973). For Lens, Cassan came up with a plan said to be inspired by the shape of a steam locomotive boiler in which the rounded arches represent the wheels and a tower to represent the funnel. The concourse and booking hall was decorated on all four walls with mosaic panels that portrayed the local industry, coal mining and the miners who extracted the coal in stylised pictorial form. They were the work of Auguste Labouret (1871-1964). Labouret was principally a stained glass artist with a reputation for the sensitive restoration of church stained glass. But he often worked on railway stations, among others, Saint Quentin (also designed by Cassan), Lyon and Gare Saint-Lazare.

Each decorative panel is about 1.5m in height, extending to almost the full width of the station interior. Over the ticket windows we see colliery winding gear and associated industrial buildings in a modified Cubist idiom. Another panel is flanked by grim-faced miners, shouldering pick-axes and gripping miners’ lamps against a backdrop of pit-heads, slag heaps and smoking chimneys. The third panel is a landscape of bridges and factory buildings with cargo ships and tugs. The final panel (and the one that greets the arriving passenger) continues and develops the communication theme, pipes and tubes, telegraph wires to one side – on the other a massive steam locomotive powers its way into the composition. The installation appears to be made with standard-size tiles, some of which are laid intact, though most are fragmented to a greater or lesser degree. The colour scheme is a muted harmony of blacks, whites, greys and brown.

The station buildings and the tower are all rendered and painted white with decorative patterned concrete mouldings. The Art Deco-inspired window frames are formed of slender, geometric glazing bars, painted in red. A Deco-styled font was used for the original cast iron signage on the platform. To see the resemblance to a steam engine requires a little imaginative effort but it remains a splendid conceit and the only scheme where Cassan attempted anything like it. To their credit, SNCF maintain the building in first class condition.

Villa Cavrois

Villa Cavrois is what can result when wealth and status consciousness meet invention and ambition. Paul Cavrois had accumulated his fortune in the textile industry and was looking for a family home on a scale that reflected his success in business. Cavrois felt a need to distinguish himself from his fellow plutocrats and was open to a contemporary design. The work of Robert Mallet-Stevens was known to him from seeing his contributions to the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs and the publicity arising from his designs for ultra-fashionable clients, Paul Poiret (fashion designer) and avant-garde patron, Vicomte de Noailles. Cavrois owned a large vacant plot in an upper class suburb of Roubaix and in 1929 (just months before the Wall Street Crash) commissioned Mallet-Stevens to design a large scale family home in a Modernist idiom.

When the house was completed in 1932 the Cavrois family moved into a remarkably spacious home in which almost every piece of furniture and every aspect of internal decoration was the work of the architect, Mallet-Stevens. The Cavrois fortune comfortably absorbed all the extra cost of purpose-built furnishings in return for a bespoke dwelling in which no detail, from light fitting to door handle or from radiator covers to wall clocks was left to chance. Modernism without excessive formal purity was the result - the harshness and doctrinaire control associated with the movement was neatly sidestepped. For the occupants there was the excitement of living in a home like no other surrounded by elegance and comfort, all wrapped up in sweeping, curving forms influenced by Art Deco. Mallet-Stevens designed a system of stretched yellow bricks, adaptable to concave and convex curves, lintels and corners, and laid exclusively on the stretcher side. The inspiration for this came from Dudok’s recently completed Raadhuis Hilversum.

The Art Deco influence on the exterior can be seen in the cylindrical belvedere tower and the extended sun decks – internally the chromed fixtures and fittings and the proliferation of circular forms continue the theme. The Cavrois appetite for Modernism didn’t run to paintings and sculpture, there are few artworks on the walls in period photos, but Mallet-Stevens themed several of the major rooms around aspects of Modernist painting. In what is described as the Young Man’s Room, the interaction of flat-painted geometric panels and forms resembles the abstract compositions of De Stijl. Unsurprising, given we know that Mallet-Stevens collaborated with Theo Van Doesburg on an earlier project. In the dressing room for the lady of the house, strong curved forms in the chairs, mantelpiece and mirror counterpoint the linear geometry elsewhere to give a Cubist feel to the room. At the centre of the house is a duplex sitting room with double height glass doors on to the sun terrace. The luxurious orange marble fireplace is equivalent to the onyx wall in the contemporary Villa Tugendhat by Mies van der Rohe.

During the war, the Villa Cavrois was requisitioned by the Wehrmacht whose heavy presence caused immense damage. When the family regained possession they commissioned a complete and conservative redesign of the interior which remained in place until the death of the last family member in 1986. At this point it fell into the hands of developers whose intention was to divide the grounds into individual plots. Various attempts to give the building legal protection were frustrated by the developer until a Prime Ministerial decree settled the matter. The developer responded in the time honoured way by allowing the building to deteriorate through vandalism. After a prolonged local campaign, the French state bought the Villa in 2001 – it was opened to the public in 2012 after 10 years of restoration to original condition.

Hoover Building, Western Avenue

It’s indicative of Britain’s hollowed-out industrial base that so many of our best known factories are now carefully preserved relics of a lost age of manufacturing. This example alongside Western Avenue in Perivale, built for Hoover (1932-35) is perhaps the most famous and the most esteemed. Architects Wallis, Gilbert & Partners specialised in designing long, low and deep factory premises for the wave of American manufacturers of consumer goods expanding into the UK in the inter-war years. For American business, advertising and promotion began with the factory facade and a prominent location. Wallis Gilbert & Partners rapidly developed unique expertise in the provision of eye-catching buildings tarted up with newly fashionable Art Deco detailing.

Western Avenue and the Great West Road offered highly visible development sites on newly expanded arterial roads to businesses that saw the future in terms of road transport rather than rail. Internally the new factories embodied all the latest efficiency thinking in production line technology and conformed to contemporary best practice in placing the journey from raw materials to finished product entirely under one roof. The Hoover and Firestone factories (the latter on the Great West Road) became the best known of these dazzling and exuberant facades designed to please and were viewed with affection by the passing public despite the generalised aversion to Modernism in the wider population. After 1980 when the Firestone Building was destroyed in an act of corporate vandalism there was renewed public support for conserving what remained of these time capsules as a result of which the redundant Hoover Building, by now II* listed, was redeveloped in 1993 to accommodate a Tesco supermarket behind a carefully preserved facade.

Joan S Skinner (in her book, Form and Fancy, Factories by Wallis Gilbert & Partners, 1916-1939) takes a dim view of the Hoover Building. In her eyes it’s visually incoherent and lacking in unity – an unhappy combination of individually interesting but unrelated forms. She points out the uneasy relationship between Egyptian and Native North American design traditions. Modernist sensibilities were also offended by what they saw as vulgarity and frivolity, an absence of rigour and a regressive aesthetic. In 1951 Pevsner delivered his verdict (in the Buildings of England, Middlesex) – “perhaps the most offensive of the modernist atrocities along this road of typical bypass factories”. Pevsner’s seal of approval was reserved for the purest expressions of Modernist geometry – never to be found on Western Avenue. This is architecture as advertising – a working building with a flashy facade, best seen when floodlit after dark from the windows of passing Armstrong-Siddeleys, Lanchesters and Alvises cruising by en route from Denham Studios, Gerrards Cross or Beaconsfield to the West End.

The present situation has endured for more than 20 years but all is about to change. IDM Properties are preparing to convert the former (and now untenanted) office accommodation inside the Hoover Building into apartments. Planning permission and listed building consent for 66 apartments (zero affordable) was obtained on appeal in February 2016. Assuming the facade is refurbished and protected and there is no plan to provide car parking in front of the building this may be no bad thing, although from a social perspective, the all too familiar provision of zero affordable is deplorable. The external finishes are showing signs of decay so redecoration would be desirable.

India of Inchinnan

One day last June we drove through the rain along the A8 en route for Wemyss Bay and a ferry to Rothesay. On our left hand side, west of Renfrew, this crisply defined and immaculately maintained building shone through the gloom. When completed in 1930 it was known as India of Inchinnan and it began manufacturing tyres to meet increased demand from the rapidly growing band of motorists. It was an early example of a factory in a countryside location on a major road, far from canals or rail connections. The land on which it stands became available when the construction of World War 1 airships on the site came to an end.

The business traded as the India Tyre and Rubber Company and the factory building was designed by Wallis, Gilbert & Partners, famous for the Firestone Factory (1929) and the Hoover Building (1932) in West London. The result was a long and impressive two storey office frontage in reinforced concrete finished in Atlas White cement with a manufacturing block behind. Tyre production ended in 1982 by which time the business was a subsidiary of Dunlop and only the office block survived. 

Almost two decades of neglect followed but after the building was listed Category A by Historic Scotland a restoration project was completed in 2003. The project involved extending the offices at the back and the enlarged premises are now occupied by technology companies. The facade and the entrance lobby are as originally built with the main entrance especially impressive with decorative bands of red, green and black faience applied to the caps and bases of the columns. The main doors are set into a proscenium arch with tiled and faience surround. Geometric Art Deco glazing bars add to the visual drama. It’s an object lesson in the successful reuse and rehabilitation of redundant buildings of special quality.