Echo Deco

Here’s a photo of Chicago’s NBC building taken at Worldcon a month or so ago.

With its vertical lines, symmetry, setbacks, towering mast, and flying buttresses (!!!), the building is a clear example of Art Deco.

Except that this building dates from the wrong era.  Art Deco was created in the 1920s and died (as an architectural style) with the Great Depression, when no one could afford to build skyscrapers any more.  As an industrial design movement, Deco died with the end of World War II.

This building, however, was built in the 1970s, and in a deliberately anachronistic style that has been called “Echo Deco.”

By the way, did you know that “Art Deco” was a term that didn’t come along until the 1960s?  During its heydey, Deco was known as Style Moderne, Streamline Moderne, or simply Streamline.  (All this Moderne to be distinguished from Modernism, which was another architectural movement altogether.)