SHELF LIFE
PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURISM
By Sandy McLendon

A passenger on the French Line’s Normandie once described the fabled ship as “a Busby Berkeley production…with class.” The phrase is that of Maria Riva, whose mother, actress Marlene Dietrich, was a favored guest aboard the beautiful and doomed liner. Riva’s words are more than borne out in maritime writer John Maxtone-Graham’s new book, Normandie: France’s Legendary Art Deco Ocean Liner (W.W. Norton, hardcover, $100, 260 pages, over 200 illustrations in sepia and color). More than just a ship, the Normandie served as a floating showcase for all that was best in French Art Deco; her public rooms were designed by the nation’s finest artisans. They included Deco ironwork elevator cages by ferroniste Raymond Subes, églomisé (reverse-painted) glass panels by artist Jean Dupas in the Grand Salon and an astonishing double row of 12 sixteen-foot-tall Lalique crystal sculptures in a First Class dining room more than 300 feet long. Maxtone-Graham takes the reader from the shipyard preparations necessary to build a hull longer than anything previously attempted, to Normandie’s sad end, burned and capsized at a pier in New York while being converted to wartime use as a troop ship. The author knowledgably discusses the influence of designer Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann (1879-1933) on the ship’s interiors, but the book’s design is wanting. The placement of photographs relates poorly to the text and the reproduction of the vintage photos in sepia tone imposes a false period look on a book that otherwise does an excellent job of demonstrating the relevance of the Normandie’s glories today.

Lisa D. Schrenk’s Building a Century of Progress: The Architecture of Chicago’s 1933-34 World’s Fair (University of Minnesota Press, hardcover, $39.95, 357 pages, 196 black-and-white illustrations) is that rarity: a scholarly book that’s a lot of fun to read. Schrenk, a professor of architecture at Norwich University, traces the Century of Progress fair from its inception, through the politics and financing necessary to create it, to the merry, futuristic blast of the fair itself. The author has a knack for details that make the vintage photos come alive, giving a remarkably vivid sense of strolling the fair’s grounds and exhibits. She’s especially good at describing the exhibit houses built by several companies, including the glass and steel Crystal House designed by George Frederick Keck, which featured a frank use of trusses on its exterior. Keck’s famed circular House of Tomorrow is here, too; Schrenk’s impeccable research even turns up the octagonal 19th-century house that Keck used as inspiration. The volume is packed full, not only with what did happen at the fair, but what didn’t happen, like having Norman Bel Geddes design an amphitheater for it. Schrenk intertwines what was with what might have been, so that the reader emerges with an understanding of how rejected proposals like Bel Geddes’s influenced what was actually designed and built. Anyone who is truly familiar with the Century of Progress is one of two things: they’re nearly a hundred years old or they’ve just finished this fascinating book.

USA: Modern Architectures in History (Reaktion Books, softcover, $29.95, 272 pages, 200 black and white illustrations) is the portentous title of a book that turns out to be an engaging overview of American modernism. That’s no accident; the author, Gwendolyn Wright, is co-host of History Detectives on public television. Her on-air talent for making the arcane accessible translates well to print; this remarkably comprehensive volume is full of telling, even funny details alongside the scholarship. Packed with small but clear and relevant photographs, USA takes the reader on a tour of buildings grand and humble, large and small, famous and obscure. Set-pieces of American modernist architecture like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax Building get their due, but so do works like Roland Wank’s gantry for the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kentucky Dam, shown to be even more formally ambitious than Wright’s shaping of concrete. Gwendolyn Wright manages to be an architectural historian without being an architecture snob; in her view, temporary cottages, summer houses and drive-in banks can be just as important as Richard Neutra’s Kaufmann House in Palm Springs or the Seagram Building in New York, designed by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson. If there’s a quibble with this book, it’s the price: $30 is a lot for a small-format softcover volume with no color plates. It’s to be hoped that architecture buffs will look beyond USA’s unprepossessing appearance and find justification for its price in its deft, knowledgeable text.