The Art Deco style, which originated in France just before World War I, had an important impact on architecture and design in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s.

The United States did not officially participate, but Americans—including New York City architect Irwin Chanin and others[1]: 55 —visited the exposition,[2]: 47  and the government sent a delegation to the expo.

[3]: 6  Other influences included German expressionism, the Austrian Secession, Art Nouveau, Cubism, and the ornament of African and Central and South American cultures.

[4]: vi The Art Deco style had been born in Paris, but no buildings were permitted in that city which were higher than Notre Dame Cathedral with the exception of the Eiffel Tower.

The exterior featured bas-relief sculptures by Leo Friedlander and Lee Lawrie, and a mosaic by Barry Faulkner that required more than a million pieces of enamel and glass.

The city halls of Los Angeles, California and Buffalo, New York were built in the style, and the new state capital building in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

The Art Deco period coincided with the birth of the talking motion picture, and the age of enormous and lavishly decorated movie theaters.

Among the most famous examples are the Paramount Theatre in Oakland, California, which had a four-story high grand lobby, entered through twenty-seven doors, and could seat 3,746 people.

[7] The San Francisco architect Timothy L. Pflueger best known for the Paramount Theatre in Oakland, California, was another proponent of lavish Art Deco interiors and facades on office buildings.

The interior of his downtown San Francisco office building, 450 Sutter Street, opened in 1929, was entirely covered with hieroglyphic-like designs and ornament, resembling a giant tapestry.

The architectural style was more sober and less decorative than earlier Art Deco buildings, more in tune with the somber mood of the Great Depression.

Buildings in the style often resembled land-bound ships, with rounded corners, long horizontal lines, iron railings, and sometimes nautical features.

The style of decoration and industrial design was influenced by modern aerodynamic principles developed for aviation and ballistics to reduce air friction at high velocities.

The bullet shapes were applied by designers to cars, trains, ships, and even objects not intended to move, such as refrigerators, gas pumps, and buildings.

A large number of Art Deco hotels were built, which have been grouped together into an historical area, the Miami Beach Architectural District, and preserved, and many have been restored to their original appearance.

[15][16] The district has an area of about one square kilometer, and contains both hotels and secondary residences, all about the same height, none higher than twelve or thirteen stories.

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, a number of diners modeled after the cars of streamlined trains were produced, and appeared in different cities in the United States.

This included metal bars as chair support, rounded feet, and decorated edges, all coming together to create a complex simplicity.

prominent American artists were commissioned by the Federal Art Project to paint murals in government buildings, hospitals, airports, schools and universities.

Some the America's most famous artists, including Grant Wood, Reginald Marsh, Georgia O'Keeffe and Maxine Albro took part in the program.

The owners of the building, the Rockefeller family, discovered that Rivera, a Communist, had slipped an image of Lenin into a crowd in the painting, and had it destroyed.

[19] One of the largest Art Deco sculptures is the statue of Ceres, the goddess of grain and fertility, at the top of the Chicago Board of Trade.

American fashion magazines such as Vogue, Vanity Fair and Harper's Bazaar quickly picked up the new style and popularized it in the United States.

WPA Moderne has been used to describe restrained architecture at historic places such as the Administration Building for the City of Grand Forks at the Grand Forks Airport (built 1941–43) in North Dakota, the Municipal Auditorium and City Hall (Leoti, Kansas) (built 1939–42) in Kansas, and the Kearney National Guard Armory in Nebraska.