Thursday 11 April 2019

Flights of fancy

























The title is Art Deco airports but it's much more far-ranging than a narrow architectural survey of these places. It looks at eleven in Europe and twenty-six in the US and oddly for a book from an Australian publisher nothing on airports in that country or even New Zealand which has the art deco center of the southern hemisphere in Napier on the North Island.

European airports get a better showing than those in America, Croydon Aerodrome, London's main one in the twenties, gets sixteen pages but Chicago's Municipal only one page. The copy throughout the book seems to be based on the social history of airports and the aircraft that landed there rather than architectural detail and there are no flat plans.
 
Probably half the book is illustrations, a mix of historical photos, printed ephemera and Rosie Louise's fascinating photo-based vector graphics. There are several dozen of these in various sizes and I thought, because of their precision, they sat rather oddly with the historical black and whites that varied enormously in quality.

This will probably be the only book on the subject and worth it for Ms Louise's vector graphics. Incidentally, I bought this book from the publisher's website at a remarkably good price but elsewhere on the net the cost seemed excessive.

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