A House in Tulsa

This is a nice house in Tulsa.

Nice deco features like the small porch barely covering the door and the rounded room at the front of the house contrasting with the rectangle of the rest of the structure. Great use of glass bricks maintaining privacy but still allowing the like into the house.

I like the narrow window near the front door. Half the size of the windows on the upper level and the one between the sections of glass bricks.

No doubt, though, my favourite part of this house is the zigzag railing on the on the raised patio along the frontof the house. Simple, clean lines. A real beauty.

Peace, Calais

This sculpture in the Richelieu Garden beside the Town Hall in Calais is probably too late to be considered true Art Deco but I can see some elements in the stylisation that remind me of the deco period.

It was created by Yves de Coetlogon (1913-1973) to honour the fallen in both World Wars through the allegory of Peace. It replaced an earlier WWI monument by Moreau-Vauthier that had been extensivly damaged during WWII. Before that, Rodin's Burghers of Calais stood here until it was moved in 1924 to it's present location in front of the Town Hall.

The sculpture was unveiled in 1962, 100 years after the original garden had been established.

Perhaps not unexpectedly, there are a lot of memorials around this part of France as can be seen at Monuments aux morts pacifistes.

Wikianos Supermarket, Asmara

When I sat down and asked myself, 'where in the deco world will I go tonight?', my thoughts turned to Asmara. What was the name of the supermarket in Liberation Avenue? Reaching for my trustly Lonely Planet guidebook it automatically openned to the map of Asmara and I had my answer. Wikianos.

Wikianos Supermarket is in one corner of a large mixed residential/commercial building which takes up a whole block.

It was designed by Antonio Vitaliti and constructed in 1944. Quite late for an Italian building in Asmara.

The photo above shows the driveway entrance to the inner courtyard of the building. There are massive curved walls leading off the main street which are echoed in the windows on the balcony on the second storey.

To me the most interesting part of the building is the corners. The corner balconies are rounded as opposed to the right-angled roofline which cover them.

Reference:
Lonely Planet, Ethiopia, Eritrea & Djibouti ~ Frances Lindsay Gordon, 1st Ed, November 2000

Enterprise Building, Durban

Downtown Durban has a large number of art deco buildings including this one, the Enterprise Building.

The office building was designed by A A Richie McKinley and built in 1931.

Eight storeys tall, painted grey but with some amazing decoration.

Flanking the seventh floor balcony are a pair of winged creatures. The building is not in the best of shape so it is difficult to see exactly what type of creature they might be.

Between these creatures on the front of the balcony is a more typical geometric art deco element.

Lower on the building, the decoration is in much better condition.

The stand-out is this stylised eagle above the main entrance.

I particularily like the depiction of the birds claws, as if it is perched on the lintel.

Elsewhere, near the entrance, there are a pair of Roman fasces supported by Mayan-style heads.

Louis Hay's Office, Napier

The slender red brick building is the office that Napier architect Louis Hay built for himself after his previous office was damaged in the devastating 1931 earthquake.

The windows are interesting and the dark layer of bricks grounds the building but otherwise there is little or no decoration until the roofline.

Centred on the building is an arrangement of lines, squares, circles and finally a diamond bearing the year 1932. You can see these elements in various combinations in Hay's buildings all over Napier.

Above this detail rows of bricks are stepped back creating subtle interest.

The columns are also capped with decoration. Thin smooth rendered sections, painted a light cream or green colour, narrow the brick columns as the approach the sky. A series of twelve bricks are spaced up the column jutting out from the flat surface. The whole column is then topped with a green slab.

Former Shop, Port Melbourne

I've written previously about a former shop in Port Melbourne that was built in deco style and here is another one, also in Port Melbourne.

The use of bricks is interesting. The back of the shop and attached residence are in a dark red brick, while the front of the shop has been constructed using cream bricks with dark brown used for the bottom portion of the wall and for decoration.

The verandah looks new but above that there is very simple deco detailling. Speedlines or speed whiskers (as I learnt at Dr Matthew Martin's presentation, Streamliners, at the NGV Art Deco Symposium in June) decorate the edge of the parapet while a stepped vertical element is centered on the curved corner.

House, Glengowrie

This house is in the Adelaide suburb of Glengowrie.

I like porch and the rounded corner and window but most of all I like the low metal fence with the diamond motifs.

Former Foundry, Richmond

In an industrial area of Richmond, quite close to where Dame Nellie Melba was born, there is a grey, non-descript single storey building. A former foundry. It has rounded corners on the walls at the loading bay entrance and may even have a simple stepped parapet, I don't recall.

It does, however, have a wonderful frieze depicting well-muscled workers in various aspects of building construction.

In the foreground, one man is sawing timber while two others empty a wheelbarrow. If you look closly at the top centre, there is also a man riding a large girder, perhaps the product of this foundry, as it is lifted into place by a crane.