Everything You Need to Know About Style Moderne

Streamline Moderne is a unique international style of Art Deco design and architecture that emerged during the 1930s. It was largely inspired by aerodynamic architecture. Streamline architecture focused on curved forms, long straight lines, and even sometimes nautical themes. The result was modern sleek design that resembles the streamlined lines of today’s sports cars, flying cars, and streamlined helicopters.

Streamline art deco design is characterized by straight lines that are balanced with soft curves or just not straight at all. Streamlined design was most known for being created on homes, buildings, and other structures. Streamlines are considered to be simple and elegant. Curved edges and heavy ornamentation are part of the streamlined look of streamline art deco designs. Streamlined architecture is known for showcasing slender building forms with sharp angles that resemble modern airplane wings.

Another style of Art Deco that has become popular over the past decade is Art Noveau. This style takes its influence from European baroque art nouveau. While Art Deco is very much about form, the art nouveau movement looked to add interest in the visual aspects of a construction by using geometric shapes and materials. The combination of geometric shapes with more organic materials like wood, glass, and metal created a new vocabulary that the ancients could understand.

Many times the geometric elements in Art Noveau are used in straight lined lines that appear in the houseplans of mansions and palaces. Geometric shapes and wood designs like cubes, rectangles, and ovals are often featured in this type of architecture. Examples of materials commonly found in Art Noveau style Moderne include marble, wrought iron, limestone, and glass. With French furniture being a thing of beauty, French furniture is also frequently incorporated into this type of architecture.

In the mid twentieth century, Art Deco style started to experience a decline in popularity. Part of the reason for this was the arrival of more modern, geometric designs. A trend that followed this change was the use of steel, which combined efficiency and beauty in a way that had never been achieved before. By combining the best of the previous styles with the modernism of steel, the result was the Art Deco style of sleek and uniform glass that’s commonly seen in most modern buildings today. This type of architecture focuses on form over function, and while it does a fine job at both, the goal is to create a one-of-a-kind structure that stands the test of time. The use of clean geometric lines combined with natural materials like wood, stone, glass, and steel create a timeless, distinguished look that can be enjoyed by anyone no matter their age.

As mentioned, Art Deco style moderne was born out of the excesses of the Industrial Revolution. People weren’t quite sure how to use the excess materials available to them, so they just took what they liked and left the rest. When everything was new and shiny, it didn’t take long for Art Deco designs to take hold of the public imagination and become mainstream. This style became popular in America during the late 1890s, but it wasn’t until the turn of the century that it truly began to define itself as something worth celebrating. Now, nearly everyone recognizes the Art Deco designs that are all over our culture and homes.