Arts and Crafts to Art Deco

Between the Victorian revivals and the arrival of the flat white box, roughly 1860 to 1939, architecture tried three escapes from the historical catalogue. Arts and Crafts went backwards into the vernacular and found honesty there. Art Nouveau went sideways into nature and invented an ornament nobody had used before. Art Deco went forwards into the machine and made geometry glamorous. All three are easy to recognise once you know which question each was answering.

Arts and Crafts: the vernacular, taken seriously

William Morris hated what industrial production had done to the made object. The building that states the case is the Red House at Bexleyheath (1859), designed for him by Philip Webb: red brick inside and out, a steep red-tiled roof, bare oak, enormous plain chimneys, and windows placed where the rooms needed them rather than where symmetry demanded. It has Gothic feeling but copies no Gothic building. That is the whole idea — the medieval method, not the medieval motif.

The tells on any Arts and Crafts building are material and plan rather than style:

• Local materials, left legible: roughcast render, hand-made tile, unpainted oak, local stone or brick.
• Roofs that dominate, sweeping low and often catslide, with dormers cut into them.
• Massive chimneystacks, sometimes buttressed, treated as sculpture.
• Windows in horizontal groups, small-paned with leaded lights, sitting tight under the eaves.
• Asymmetry that clearly comes from the plan inside, not from picturesque taste.
• Ornament that is craft — ironmongery, carved newel posts, tiles, embroidery — rather than applied history.

C. F. A. Voysey is the most recognisable hand: white roughcast walls, long low slate roofs, broad sloping chimneys, ribbons of casements. Broadleys, Windermere (1898) and The Orchard, Chorleywood (1899) look so stripped that later writers claimed him as a proto-Modernist. He was nothing of the sort, and said so. Edwin Lutyens is the virtuoso: Munstead Wood (1896) and Deanery Garden (1901), vernacular materials handled with a geometer’s wit, usually with Gertrude Jekyll planting the garden. Lutyens then turned classical — New Delhi, the Cenotaph — which is a warning about dating an architect from one building.

Art Nouveau: the line that will not sit still

Around 1893 something genuinely new appears. Art Nouveau takes its forms from plant growth: the stem, the tendril, the bud, the wave. Its signature is the whiplash line (coup de fouet), an asymmetric curve that gathers tension and releases it.

Victor Horta’s Hôtel Tassel, Brussels (1893) is the origin: iron left frankly visible inside a house, then bent into curves that the mosaic floor and painted walls echo. Hector Guimard put the style on the pavement with the cast-iron Paris Métro entrances (1900), whose lamps grow like seed heads. In Barcelona, Antoni Gaudí’s Catalan Modernisme goes further and lets the organic impulse into the structure: Casa Batlló (1904–06) with its bone-like balconies and scaled roof, Casa Milà (1906–12) with walls quarried rather than built, catenary arches, and trencadís, the mosaic of deliberately smashed tile.

Then Glasgow. Charles Rennie Mackintosh belongs to the movement but inverts its temperament. His interiors are white, tall and sparse; his furniture is exaggeratedly vertical; his curve is a single stem ending in a tight stylised rose, set against severe rectangles. The Glasgow School of Art (1897–1909) has a hard, almost fortified stone front and ironwork of extraordinary refinement. That imposed geometry is the bridge: from Mackintosh and the Vienna Secession the line runs straight to Art Deco.

Art Deco: geometry, machinery and glamour

Art Deco takes its name from the Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes of 1925, but the label was coined only in the 1960s — contemporaries said Jazz Modern, or Moderne. It is not one source but a raid on many: Egypt after Tutankhamun, Aztec and Mesoamerican stepped pyramids, Cubism, the Ballets Russes, and above all the machine.

What you actually see:

• The ziggurat: a façade or tower stepping back in stages as it rises.
• Repeating angular motifs: chevrons, zigzags, sunbursts, stylised fountains, lightning flashes.
• Verticality on tall buildings: continuous piers and fins running the full height, with spandrels recessed.
• Modern materials on show: chrome and stainless steel, coloured faience, black Vitrolite glass, terrazzo, neon.
• Lettering built in, in geometric sans-serif capitals.
• Symmetry, almost always.

The set pieces: the Chrysler Building, New York (William Van Alen, 1930), whose stainless-steel crown is a literal sunburst; the Hoover Building, Perivale (Wallis, Gilbert and Partners, 1933), a factory given a coloured faience temple front on the Western Avenue; the Odeon cinemas; and the lidos, seaside pavilions and underground stations of 1930s Britain. Deco is the style of leisure, transport and industry. It almost never builds a church.

Its late phase, Streamline Moderne, drops the chevrons for aerodynamics: rounded corners, long horizontal bands, applied speed lines, flagpole masts, porthole windows. This is the one most often mislabelled Modernist — but it is still decorating, using liners and aircraft as its source instead of plants.

The two that people confuse

Two further confusions worth pre-empting. Arts and Crafts against Art Nouveau: both reject the machine, but Arts and Crafts is quiet, rooted and English, deriving its shapes from old buildings, while Art Nouveau is urban, invented and continental — Britain’s Arts and Crafts establishment largely disliked it. Voysey against early Modernism: white walls, yes, but Voysey keeps the pitched roof, the chimney and the load-bearing wall, and his windows are leaded casements, not metal-framed strips.

How to spot it in ten seconds

1. Curve or angle? Sinuous organic line means Art Nouveau; chevrons and steps mean Art Deco.
2. Roof. A dominant pitched roof with big chimneys puts you in Arts and Crafts; no visible roof at all points to Deco or Modernism.
3. Symmetry. Asymmetry that follows the plan says Arts and Crafts; asymmetry that flows says Art Nouveau; strong symmetry with repeated motifs says Deco.
4. Materials on show. Hand-made tile, oak and roughcast, or chrome, faience and black glass? That alone sets you fifty years apart.
5. Look at the ironwork. Bent plant stems mean Horta or Guimard; stiff, attenuated verticals with a small rose mean Mackintosh.
6. Undulating stone and broken-tile mosaic? Gaudí, Barcelona.
7. Does the building step back as it rises? Ziggurat profile — Deco, and probably 1925–35.
8. Check the lettering. Geometric sans-serif set into the façade is a Deco habit.
9. Rounded corners and speed lines but no chevrons? Streamline Moderne, late 1930s — still Deco, not Modernism.
10. Ask what it is for. Cinema, factory, lido, hotel: Deco. Country house or vicarage: Arts and Crafts. Townhouse or café with ironwork: Art Nouveau.