Atlanta Architecture: Art Deco to Modern Classic, 1929-1959

by Robert M. Craig

Dr. Robert M. Craig defines the two distinct styles emerging between the 1920s and the 1960s�Art Deco and Modern Classic. A convincing commentary on these unique structures that have come to grace Atlanta.

Genres: Architecture

Hardcover

First published June 30, 1995

Reviews

[W. · Rating 5 out of 5]

One can become somewhat indignant reading Robert M. Craig’s “Atlanta Architecture: Art Deco to Modern Classic, 1929-1959.” Indignant because this is just the first volume in a planned but never created series of books on the architectural history of Atlanta, the South’s largest city and a largely ignored one in terms of published architectural histories. Of course, it would be a series of such promise and groundbreaking scholarship that would get canceled before it ever got started. Indeed, Dr. Craig mentions several times that this book covers only half the story of modernism in Atlanta from 1929 to 1959 as this book focuses only on Art Deco and Modern Classic (also known as Modern Classicism or Depression Modern). Steamlined Moderne and Modern (in its dogmatic High Modern and more populist Mid-Century Modern forms) would be, in the author’s words from Chapter 1, “treated in the following volume.” Unfortunately, twenty years after this book’s publication, nothing has followed it; no Volume 2 for the Atlanta Architecture series.

That is all water under the bridge. As a stand-alone volume, “Atlanta Architecture: Art Deco to Modern Classic, 1929-1959” is still excellent. By limiting his scope stylistically as well as chronologically, Dr. Craig is able to examine at greater depth the Art Deco and Modern Classic architecture constructed in Atlanta. This is opposed to looking at the whole of Atlanta’s architecture during this period, a somewhat schizophrenic period of vastly different architectural strains embodied by the modernists profiled in this book and the traditional Georgia School of Classicists.

“Atlanta Architecture” is basically divided into two sections reflecting the two styles profiled and with a fifteen page chapter on the incomparable (and otherwise undefinable) Fox Theater sandwiched in between. Although the text is very well-illustrated, there is still a substantial section of color plates, essential in providing the reader with a better sense of the polychromy of the Fox Theater and the gilded ornamental metalwork in Atlanta City Hall and the William-Oliver Building.

The scholarship in “Atlanta Architecture” is excellent; Dr. Craig achieves his stated goal of showing how Atlanta architects absorbed national architectural trends from groundbreaking architects such as Eliel Saarinen and Paul Philippe Cret and filtered that into their own architecture and Atlanta’s built environment. “Atlanta Architecture” is the best and rarest type of architecture book: one with the accessibility to appeal to the average informed general reader and one with serious scholarship to inform and provoke discussion and further research among architectural historians.

Although Pelican Publishing Company did not publish any further volumes in the Atlanta Architecture series, at least this one was published. Yet the nagging question one must ask is what if Atlanta had an architectural history series on par with Pelican Publishing Company’s other architectural history series: New Orleans Architecture?