This program is co-sponsored by the Art Deco Society of New York

The style we now know as Art Deco officially turned 100 this year, marking the centennial of the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, or the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Art in Paris from which it derived its name. Filled with exuberance, hope, and modernity, it defined the interwar years in much of the West, as societies navigated boom and bust, revolution and retrenchment, optimism and despair.

Join Executive Director Andrew Berman as he takes a look back at the roots of this design aesthetic, which grew out of revolutionary 19th and early 20th century movements, and examine how it transformed New York City, from skyline landmarks to humble neighborhood infill developments. Then he’ll zoom in on Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo, and take a closer look at the many stunning and surprising examples of the style in our neighborhoods, ranging from prominent and beloved monuments to overlooked workaday structures, with a few prisons, parking garages, and post offices in between — both surviving and long gone. He’ll look at where and why Art Deco proliferated in our neighborhoods, as well as where and why it surprisingly sometimes didn’t.

This program coincides with the release of our Art Deco Centennial StoryMap earlier this year.

Andrew Berman has been Executive Director of Village Preservation since 2002. Andrew is an architectural historian and lifelong New Yorker who worked on development and preservation issues in Greenwich Village, Lower Manhattan, and the West Side for more than three decades. The first years of his life were spent in an Art Deco apartment building on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx.

The Art Deco Society of New York is a non-profit organization that advocates for the appreciation, understanding, celebration, documentation, and preservation of Art Deco architecture, design, and culture in New York and around the world. ​ADSNY is a member supported organization and is a member of the International Coalition of Art Deco Societies (ICADS), an organization of Art Deco societies that hosts the World Congress on Art Deco every two years in an important Deco City around the world.