Art Deco

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Art Deco's simple, efficient form, encouragement and vertical elements of geometric ornament captured the spirit of the ride to the city specified safe place in the modern world.

Deco buildings, many of them high-rises towered above what was then, as now, China's most important commercial and financial center, more quickly overshadowed ornate Beaux Arts monument to the colonial powers. Deco style of the city to become the dominant architecture.

Thousands Deco structure - the hotel and theater, apartment blocks and luxury villas - which still stand, evoking the days when the sea liners berth in Shanghai and China and the European grandees mingled with movie stars and gangsters in the city's jazz clubs and dance space.

Born 1920 in Europe, the Art Deco aesthetic - inspired by advances in technology and industry - and quickly spread across the Atlantic. From the Chrysler Building in New York to the hotel from the pastel Miami Beach and the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, Art Deco architecture reshaped in the years before World War II - but the term was not coined until 1960, the name taken from the 1925 Paris-decorative exhibition popular with the art style.

Art Deco design influences ranging from airplanes to the alarm clock, the ship sofa. Deco typefaces even go. Stripping away the often elaborate decorations of architectural styles popular before World War I, it was a conscious effort to capture the spirit of modernity. Deco fell out of fashion when a new generation of designers take the next step idea: View Deco's even stripped-down as excessive decorative elements, they eliminated them all. The result is a modernist style, and after the building of steel and glass.

Former colonial outposts throughout the Asia Art Deco Gems - from the former building Banque d'Indochine in Hanoi, which is now owned by Bank Negara Indonesia, to the Hotel Savoy Homann in Bandung, Indonesia. That's Deco allure even the maharajah of Jodhpur in India used the style in the sprawling palace he built in the 1930s.

But some places in the world embraced the spirit of Art Deco from Shanghai, a city obsessed with fashion and fixated on the up-to-date - in part because of this view, occurred in China at the time, which can only be by modernizing the country and restore the strength of standing imperialism for the West and militant Japan.


The life of many of Shanghai Art Deco property is thanks in part economic stagnation following the Communist Party of China's victory in the civil war in 1949. There is little new construction until 1990, so relatively few buildings demolished, although some were damaged by Red guards during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s dan'70s.

More recently, has been preservation of the passive to active, with government planners and developers to grow more interested in protecting and restoring the once-neglected buildings as potential tourist destinations. For example, Shanghai city officials pressed the state-run company that has a Peace Hotel, an Art Deco icon, to make a multimillion dollar renovation. The hotel, which will be managed by Fairmont Hotels & Resorts, has not set a date to reopen.

Akan join the Yangtze Hotel Deco style, the return earlier this month after a $ 30 million renovation and gutting that aims to restore its original Glitz. Hotel, the name of the Langham Yangtze Boutique Shanghai, has 96 rooms and features a new Deco-inspired interior - along with modern amenities such as spas.


For now, however, the allure of Shanghai Deco lovers is for general dilapidation many buildings, which can provide a sense of explorers in the unearthing of architecture parents. Some of the previous upscale villa and apartments that are not in the weakness of ethical decay, many with several families who migrated after the revolution. Facades are often hidden by laundry drying.

Once they are the foundation of China stomping foreign capitalists and local elites - growing rich in the new industry such as textiles, trade and finance. At that time, Shanghai is divided into three parts: a city in China, led by British International Settlement and the French Concession, the second of two legacies opiate Wars in the 19th century.