Streamline Moderne – NBC Radio City Studios – Sunset and Vine – Architect John C. Austin (City Hall, The Observatory)

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17 Comments

  1. July 11, 2013

    There was a song called “In a Long White Room” sung by Nancy Wilson. My mom had the .45 and I listened to it about a thousand times because I thought the lyrics were cool. “In a long white room, with no beginning and no end…” That’s the first thing I thought of when I saw the second photo. 🙂

    • July 11, 2013

      Perfect for an author who writes thrillers 😉
      [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1Uxo1Kblvo&w=420&h=315]

      • July 11, 2013

        I love it! Can you believe those lyrics? hah! “…we’ll dream about trains. You’ll call me beauty and I’ll call you brains, but no one’s comparing, so no one complains…” This song should have been on Mad Men, right? 🙂

  2. George Kaplan
    July 11, 2013

    Such a wonderfully balanced design, almost alien in its perfection. Just the Decoest of Art, and the name “Streamline Moderne” is so apt! I have an affinity for the “moderne” world. 🙂 I adore the shining surfaces of the interior too! Such a shame much of the “moderne” has gone. *pouts*

    • July 11, 2013

      The shining surfaces that have to be buffed constantly to maintain that sheen — imagine the work involved in keeping a black polished floor mirror perfect in between takes on a Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire film…

      • George Kaplan
        July 11, 2013

        Squeak! Squeak! Squeak! Shoes on those shiny floors… Waxing and buffing them *would* be nightmarish… But it *looks* great!

      • July 12, 2013

        On that kind of set you have to wear booties!

  3. July 11, 2013

    *swoons*

    those lines.

    that light.

    quelle elegant(e)!

    • July 11, 2013

      I quite agree 🙂

  4. Heather in Arles
    July 11, 2013

    What year, Ms. Lester?

    • July 11, 2013

      Props, as those hip hop types used to say. Mega props. But holy cow walking down that main hallway could give any person the heebie-jeebies, non?

      • July 12, 2013

        Just imagine it in color and not austere black and white and you’ll get a sense of how it was…

  5. July 11, 2013

    Dearest V
    Now that is the kind of modernism I can always do with more of… those lines… the lines of beauty as Hogarth might remark.
    Yours ever
    The Perfumed Dandy

    • July 12, 2013

      You mentioning Hogarth made me remember the first time I had an avocado salad – it was a halved avocado filled with vinaigrette served in an empty 18th century dining room, dark and paneled and lined with paintings in London. It must have been somebody’s club… I was with my parents, and a friend of theirs who was an architect, but, would they have let a child into one of those old clubs? My previous knowledge of the fruit was that they grew on trees, were hard as rocks, and were perpetually gnawed on by squirrels.

  6. July 11, 2013

    Funny thing me and art Deco. I grew up in Los Angeles and all those wonderful buildings to me in the late 50’s and early 60’s looked so “old fashioned” to me. I was all about the Googie restaurants and Richard Nutra homes. To me the epitome of glamour was the Capitol Records Building! It took a long time for me to come to appreciate Deco.

    • July 12, 2013

      When I was a kid I wanted everything to resemble The Jetsons! I know exactly what you’re talking about 🙂

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