The Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes, the world’s first exhibition of art deco, was held in Paris one hundred years ago, introducing a style that influenced the design of furniture, textiles, glass, ceramics, advertising, jewellery, and of course also architecture to wider audiences.
To mark the event, the French capital is celebrating with two exhibitions, one on art deco across the decorative arts and the other on art deco architecture. Taken together, they provide a welcome reminder of the historical importance of this major 20th-century style that, starting in Paris in the early decades of the last century, went on to spread across the globe leaving its mark on the Middle East and perhaps particularly on Cairo.
There can be few visitors to Downtown Cairo today who have not been struck by the city’s collection of art deco cinemas clustered around Talaat Harb Street and including the Radio, the Metro, and the Diana or by the many art deco-styled apartment buildings and commercial premises particularly in the Downtown and Zamalek districts. Among the best known are the ensembles of art deco apartment buildings along Qasr al-Aini Street and into Garden City, various storefronts along 26 July, and the Baehler and Sednaoui buildings and Groppi’s famous coffee shop on Talaat Harb Square.
Though art deco, perhaps the first completely modern architectural style, can sometimes be difficult to distinguish from the streamlined international style that followed it, at least in its elegance and aspiration, it is not so difficult to tell apart from the preceding style of art nouveau. Characterised by the use of organic forms and tried and tested materials, as well as, in the main, of traditional technology, art nouveau was very different from art deco, whose clean and geometric lines were intended to signal an architecture that did not look back to vernacular origins but instead was pointed towards the machine age.
Art deco architecture’s use of reinforced concrete and materials such as glass and steel and its association with new building types, above all the skyscraper in the United States, meant that it swiftly came to be identified with modern architecture as such in many parts of the world. It was widely employed for buildings that had little history to carry with them, such as cinemas, airports, and sports halls, and it was enlivened by a characteristic decorative repertoire of geometric forms, sunbursts, chevrons, zigzags, lightning bolts, stylised human and animal figures, and radiating fans.
The first of the two Paris exhibitions held to commemorate the 1925 exhibition that put the new style on the map is at the Musée des arts décoratifs, part of the Louvre, and runs until April this year. It focuses on art deco design in areas such as ceramics, glassware, furniture, metalwork, textiles, interior decoration, and advertising. The second exhibition, at the nearby Cité de l’architecture, the French architectural museum, looks at the architecture exhibited at the 1925 exhibition, reconstructing the plans of the original show on the Esplanade des Invalides in central Paris and providing information on some of the architects who took part.
While art deco architecture is perhaps most associated with the skyscraper boom in New York in the 1920s when the city’s skyline began to be transformed by the construction of ever taller buildings, it did not only have to mean high-rise, at least at its residential end, even if in the US there was often an emphasis on size and scale.
Visitors to Miami Beach in Florida today will be familiar with a kind of miniature tropical art deco from the city’s low-rise apartment buildings and hotels, a use of the style that harkens back to its origins in the 1920s, a decade characterised by the emergence of the film industry and the worldwide growth of tourism.
However, for many people art deco architecture will more often mean buildings like the Chrysler Building in New York City, built in 1930 and decorated with steel elements such as eagle gargoyles, car radiator cap motifs – Walter Chrysler was an automobile tycoon – and abstract circles and linear patterns, all designed to suggest machinery and motion. Then there is the famous roofline steel cladding that makes effective use of geometrical elements such as semi-circles and triangles to give an appropriate sense of drama to the whole.
The nearby Empire State Building, built in 1931, similarly seeks to dignify the new typology of the skyscraper by capitalising on the zoning laws that forced designers to incorporate stepped setbacks and making this, like some other high-rise buildings of the period, look like modern versions of ancient ziggurats with decorative elements emphasising an overall impression of verticality and power.
CENTENARY: Visitors to the Musée des art décoratifs exhibition expecting an account of the American adoption and transformation of art deco will be disappointed, since the emphasis is firmly on the French origins of the style.
Perhaps because the Musée is pre-eminently a design museum, a French equivalent of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, there is little mention of art deco architecture, even if there is a strong emphasis on art deco interior design, at least for domestic and not, as in America, for business purposes.
One of the major differences between French art deco and American art deco, and indeed art deco in some other parts of the world, was that the French version was a luxury style designed to signal exclusivity. The American style, on the other hand, used for commercial premises as much as private apartments, explored how art deco designs could be harnessed to mass production without loss of quality – something that was anathema to French designers despite their licensing some of their ceramics, tableware, and furniture designs to department stores.
Entering the Paris exhibition, visitors are introduced to the background to the 1925 exhibition, planned since before the First World War but many times delayed, and the determination of both the then French government and the country’s network of decorators and designers to restore Paris to what they believed was its rightful place as the arbiter of design.
The early rooms take visitors through the work of French designers who either exhibited at the 1925 show or were associated with the art deco style, mostly ignoring the other international exhibitors. There are major pieces taken from the Musée’s own holdings, including some that may be familiar from standard catalogues, including furniture by Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann, sometimes seen as the most important designer, glassware by Marcel Goupy and René Lalique, ceramics by Jean Besnard, tableware by Jean Puiforcat, and lacquer work by Eileen Gray, Irish by origin but working in Paris.
Interior designers such as Leon Jallot and Pierre Chareau are recognised through reconstructions of famous interiors such as a reception room and office of a proposed French embassy presented at the 1925 exhibition. Collectors like Jacques Doucet and Nelly and Robert de Rothschild are given rooms of their own that are designed to salute their contributions, notably in Doucet’s case in the post-War decades after 1945 when the opulence of art deco went down less well with French as well as other audiences and many pieces were either destroyed or sold off at knock-down prices.
While there are gestures towards the international impact of the style, influential, the exhibition says, because of the luxury interiors seen in some US films, as well as its use on trans-Atlantic liners and high-end trains like the Paris-Istanbul Orient Express, the exhibition misses the opportunity to dwell on this aspect of art deco, even if, from the French point of view, it may be among the most important.
Art deco was probably the last time that French decorators and designers managed to play their traditional role as the arbiters of European and even international taste, and it will have been for this reason that the 1925 exhibition that acted as its nucleus and showcase has been thought worth commemorating.
It was not only American architects and designers who would have come away from this exhibition determined to incorporate its lessons into their own designs. The art deco style spread over the succeeding years across southern Europe and particularly into areas under French influence, which is why much of Downtown Cairo, designed in part by French or Italian architects, contains much evidence of it, as do other cities on the southern side of the Mediterranean such as Casablanca and Algiers.
CAIRO: In Egypt, art deco seems to have meant chiefly architecture, though there are probably still some pieces of art deco furniture and objets d’art hiding out in private apartments or antique stores in Alexandria and Cairo.
While much of Downtown Cairo has today been branded as Khedival Cairo as a way of signaling the area’s origins in the later decades of the 19th century, in fact this was chiefly when the street plan was laid out, with much of the urban texture dating from some decades later. Many of the Downtown district’s buildings were built in the early decades of the last century, often between around 1910 and 1940 and during the period when art deco found its most significant architectural following.
Moreover, much of the decoration and architectural elements of buildings from the period – including light fixtures, ironwork, door and window grills, decorative plasterwork, and surface treatment – is art deco in style or inspiration. This means that visitors to Cairo can enjoy art deco designs on both the larger and the smaller scale in line with a philosophy that held that all parts of a building should pull together and work as an ensemble.
The Baehler and Sednaoui buildings on Qasr Al-Nil and Talaat Harb Square, for example, are often cited as important Cairo iterations of art deco owing to their strong vertical emphasis, clear and legible volumes, and abstracted floral or geometric decoration. Similarly, the Downtown district’s classic cinemas, most of which are still in use today, feature often vertical façades, abstract geometric ornament, integrated signage, and originally opulent lobbies and fixtures that locate them firmly in the art deco architecture of the 1930s.
Art deco, perhaps particularly in its French version, emphasised surface decoration and expensive materials, differentiating it from the undecorated streamlined curves of later modernist buildings seen to such striking effect in Downtown Cairo’s almost contemporary Immobilia building from 1940.
Walking through the area today, visitors may stop in front of the famous Yacoubian Building on Talaat Harb, built in 1937 by an Armenian architect and employing elements of art deco decoration, the Hotel Cosmopolitan on Qasr Al-Nil, built by an Italian architect in 1928 with its art deco façade and interiors, or indeed Groppi’s coffee shop on Talaat Harb, built in 1925 with its vertical facades and opulent surface treatment.
In particularly the 1920s and 1930s, major efforts were made by the Egyptian authorities to provide Downtown Cairo with the kind of public buildings seen in European capital cities of the time. Some of these also draw on art deco, with the Stock Exchange on Al-Sharifayn Street built in 1928 employing elements of the style and the Central Bank on Qasr Al-Nil, rebuilt in 1948 and described in some architectural guidebooks as Italian rationalism, being reminiscent of art deco in its ironwork and detailing.
With France celebrating the worldwide origins of the art deco style this year, it would be good to see Egypt’s art deco heritage also remembered and further work done to ensure that it is effectively valorised.
1925-2025 Cent ans d’Art déco, Musée des art décoratifs, Paris, until 26 April; Paris 1925: l’Art déco et ses architectes, Cité de l’architecture, Paris, until 29 March.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 19 February, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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