Where Art Deco and its name came from, how it reached Sydney and through whom, what local conditions did to it, and what has happened to its buildings since.
The style takes its name from the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, held in Paris from April to October 1925. The French government sponsored it, mainly to promote French luxury goods. It had about sixteen million visitors, and its rules required all work to be modern. The United States declined to take part. The style mixed many influences: historic European movements, avant-garde art, folk art, ancient and exotic cultures, and the urban imagery of the machine age.
The term Art Deco came four decades later. In its own time the style was known as Style Moderne, and British and American critics also used Jazz Moderne and Zigzag Moderne. The words first appeared in print in 1966, in the title of an exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, Les Années 25, and its curators coined it. Bevis Hillier’s book of 1968 fixed it in English, although art dealers were already using it. Some writers, among them Martin Battersby, preferred other labels.
The term can cover all modern design from the 1920s to the 1940s or only the vertical skyscraper manner of the late 1920s, with Moderne reserved for later streamlined buildings. In Australia the styles of the period are classed as Inter-War Art Deco, Streamline Moderne and Inter-War Functionalist. None of Sydney’s buildings in the style was called Art Deco when it was new.
In New York the style took shape first in skyscrapers. Two dozen major buildings were conceived or completed there between 1923 and 1932, by a small group of architects. Raymond Hood and John Mead Howells had won the 1922 Chicago Tribune competition with a neo-Gothic tower. Two features came from American conditions. New York’s 1916 zoning resolution, written to keep light and air in the streets, pushed tall buildings into stepped setbacks and made massing a main subject of design. Long unbroken bays of windows, traced back to Louis Sullivan in Chicago, gave what architects then called the “vertical style”.
Sydney’s first two buildings in the manner, both designed in 1928 and completed in 1930, looked to American skyscrapers. The Grace Building by Morrow & Gordon was based on the Chicago Tribune tower, combining Gothic elements with Art Deco. BMA House, by the competition winners Fowell & McConnel, was completed in April 1930. At the time the pair were acclaimed as the first two local buildings to really follow the dictates of the skyscraper and of modern American architecture.
Bruce Dellit and Emil Sodersten are the two architects most closely linked with the arrival of the style, and together they pioneered Art Deco in Australia. Their training ran in parallel. Both studied at Sydney Technical College, both attended Leslie Wilkinson’s lectures at the University of Sydney, and both worked in Queensland for Hall & Prentice on Brisbane’s city hall.
Dellit’s Kyle House in Macquarie Place opened late in 1931. It was one of the first Sydney office buildings to break away from traditional stylism. Its giant ground-floor arch became one of his recurring motifs.
To be content to carry on the traditions of the past is not enough; these traditions are but the foundations from which new creative forms should be developed.
The third figure is the sculptor Rayner Hoff, who arrived in July 1923 to teach at East Sydney Technical College. By the end of the decade his students formed what the curator Deborah Edwards calls “perhaps the sole instance of a coherent school of production among sculptors in Australian history”. His work appears on the Anzac Memorial and over the entrances of the City Mutual Life Building.
New York’s rule shaped how towers stepped back. Sydney’s rule capped them. In 1912 Culwulla Chambers rose to 50 metres and 14 floors, raising fears of a New York skyline and of a fire hazard beyond the reach of ladders. The Height of Buildings Act of 1912 set the limit at 150 feet, about 45 metres. It held until an amendment of 1957, and until then central buildings were uniformly 10 to 15 storeys.
So a Sydney “skyscraper” of the 1930s was usually about twelve storeys, and height was suggested through modelling. The Grace Building kept to twelve storeys, with a central tower of 213 feet. The AWA building in York Street, vertically modelled to give a skyscraper appearance, carries a steel lattice communications tower that takes it to 112.5 metres. It remained the tallest building in the city until the AMP Building.
The style arrived as the city was being rearranged. The underground railway and the Harbour Bridge, which opened in March 1932, redirected people and trams. Grace Bros chose York Street expecting traffic from the bridge and the new Wynyard station. The street never became a retail precinct, and the store was not a success. The bridge itself has four 89-metre pylons by the Scottish architect Thomas Tait, of concrete faced in Moruya granite, with no structural role.
Apart from Kyle House, major building came to a sudden halt for some five years after 1930. The Anzac Memorial’s funds, held in bonds, fell from £75,000 to £68,700, and the contract was signed in February 1932, as the Depression neared its worst point. A shortfall was partly met by selling stars for the dome at two shillings each. Hoff’s two bronze groups for the exterior were never made. A final appeal for £16,000 to complete the memorial raised £9,310. The State Theatre of 1929 came before the more restrained Art Deco style in cinema design.
Much of the material was local. Wunderlich was the only Australian maker of glazed architectural terracotta, and began producing cladding in 1924. The material was valued as clean and easy to maintain. The green terracotta of Transport House, green being the railways’ colour, is the most impressive in Sydney. The Rural Bank in Martin Place contained less than one per cent imported material. The Anzac Memorial is clad in granite from Bathurst, although its central bronze was cast in London.
Climate appears most directly in ventilation and outlook. At BMA House, perforations in the spandrel panels were an innovation to improve air circulation before air conditioning. City Mutual, six years later, was among the first buildings in Sydney to have air conditioning. At Bondi, flats built during a boom in sea bathing have splayed and curved bays that respond to the beach views, and rounded balconies.
Australian subjects entered the ornament. BMA House has six medieval knights and two koalas in faience high on its facade, a flamboyant use of Australian iconography. The Rural Bank carried rams’ heads carved in granite, for the wool industry, and murals of wool and wheat by Norman Carter. At the Anzac Memorial, Dellit’s planned Four Seasons gave way, at Hoff’s urging, to figures of the armed services, and the amber windows are etched with the rising sun above skyscraper-shaped forms.
Dellit won the competition for the Anzac Memorial in 1930. The site at the south end of Hyde Park lay under a spoil dump from the railway excavations. Gothic elements such as buttresses and cathedral windows are handled in an Art Deco manner, under a ziggurat-styled top. It opened on 24 November 1934 before a crowd estimated at 100,000.
The City Mutual Life Building opened on 1 October 1936 at Hunter and Bligh Streets. The Society’s directors preferred Sodersten’s competition design even though he had withdrawn it, and they appointed him. It has a steel frame, a corner tower, and polished black granite at the entrances beneath Hoff’s panels, finished in copper over plaster. It is the culmination of Sodersten’s Art Deco work.
People passing in the trams lean forward to gaze upon it, while those walking up Hunter Street stop to admire its streamline symmetry.
Transport House, completed in 1936 above Wynyard station, was designed by H. E. Budden & Mackey and won the Sulman Medal in 1935. Its broad facade has horizontal bands of bronze-framed windows set against a vertical tower with fins. The AWA building nearby, by Robertson, Marks & McCredie in association with D. T. Morrow & Gordon, was finished in 1939.
Sydney had 18 picture theatres in the centre and 96 in the outer suburbs by 1921. The State Theatre of 1929, by Henry Eli White with the American John Eberson, has a Gothic entrance hall and Romanesque statues. After the worst of the Depression came a boom in cinema construction. The Orpheum at Cremorne of 1935 was designed by George Newton Kenworthy, who had earlier worked with White. The Minerva at Potts Point, by Crick & Furse, opened as a live theatre on 18 May 1939.
Flats were the other large field. In 1926 a quarter of all flats built in greater Sydney were in Kings Cross, many of them six to eight storeys high with lifts, and they formed a new skyline along the ridge. Sodersten and Aaron Bolot both designed flats in the area. Sodersten’s Birtley Towers at Elizabeth Bay, of nine floors and 54 flats, dates from 1934 to 1935.
Waverley, which includes Bondi, has the second highest density of Inter-War buildings in Sydney. Some of the decoration there is brickwork: at 136 Warners Avenue, a Kenworthy design of 1938, banded face brick relies on natural colour and shadow with no render or paint. Mariposa and Monterey, of 1934, share their names with two Pacific liners introduced in 1932.
The style gave way gradually. By the late 1930s Sydney also had plain functional work, such as the Hoffnung & Co. warehouse of 1939. Sodersten moved in this direction after a European tour on which he admired Dudok and Berlage. The lifting of the height limit in 1957 and the AMP Building, opened in 1962, began a different scale of city. Development economics have seen many earlier buildings demolished for taller ones. The Trocadero dance hall of 1936 closed in 1971 and was demolished in the mid 1970s, and the Orpheum closed in 1979.
One loss was the Rural Bank, designed by the bank’s architect Frank Turner and completed in 1936. In 1981 its management proposed a replacement tower. The Royal Australian Institute of Architects and the National Trust opposed this, with a protest in March 1982 and a petition of 4,809 signatures. The council approved demolition by 14 votes to 9 in May 1982, and the Register of the National Estate listing that August came too late to stop it. It was demolished in 1982 to 1983. The dispute was over an architectural heritage that was little understood and appreciated at the time. In 1985 the planning minister, Bob Carr, used the Heritage Act 1977 to place conservation orders on other buildings in Martin Place.
The campaign led to the formation of the Art Deco Society in 1990. The Heritage Office later funded the society to study interwar apartments in the Kings Cross area and interwar housing across the state. Many of Sydney’s Art Deco buildings were added to the State Heritage Register on 2 April 1999, among them the Grace Building, BMA House, City Mutual and Kyle House. The Ritz at Randwick, by Bolot, of 1937, was also listed then, having received a conservation order in 1993 after its owners planned to demolish it.
The Anzac Memorial was listed in 2010, and the Hall of Service, part of a centenary extension, was added in 2018. The Orpheum was listed in 2024. The Metro was listed in 2020, and in 2023 the City of Sydney approved plans to make it a hotel and nightclub. Gretel Packer bought it in 2024, and in 2026 plans emerged to restore it as a live venue. Few of the apartments of Potts Point and Elizabeth Bay are protected by heritage measures.