![]() ![]() In urban centers there was a verticality to design. This style was more distinctive to urban areas such as New York with skyscrapers like the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and Radio City Music Hall. It was inspired by design elements from ancient Egypt, Rome, Asia, and Greece, with aspects of industrialization -the Machine Age. The Zigzag Moderne was a highly decorative form with zigzag designed buildings adorned with geometric ornamentation on the facades. Zigzag Moderne details of the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings in New York City. ![]() Art Deco had several variants to it, most notably Zigzag Moderne and Streamline Moderne, both of which were made less formal by American designers as they blended elements of the Arts and Crafts movement from the turn of the twentieth century. The term Art Deco was coined at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (International Exposition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts), held in Paris in 1925, which Weber attended. Short for Arts Décoratifs, Art Deco originated in France during the mid-1910s and combined the modernist styles that were emerging in Western Europe with influences from Art Nouveau, the Bauhaus movement, and Cubism. ![]() citizen in 1924.īy this time, the Art Deco movement was in full swing. Within a year, he was promoted to art director. From there, he moved to Los Angeles in 1921 and went to work as a draftsman in the design studio at Barker Bros. His work was predominately for homes in Santa Barbara and Montecito that were mostly in the Spanish Colonial Revival style. ![]() In that regard, California was kind of the perfect place to practice this kind of philosophy,” said Peter Loughrey, an appraiser for PBS’s Antiques Roadshow and director of modern design and fine art at Los Angeles Modern Auctions.Īfter the armistice was signed, Weber moved to Santa Barbara, where he designed interiors for homes and produced furniture, wood carvings, draperies, and paintings. But California “…allowed him to take what he had learned and what he had been trained in of these early proto-modernist ideas of reductionism and following along with industrialized ideas rejecting classicism, rejecting historical precedent. He briefly opened a design studio in Berkeley, California, but that didn’t last because of prejudice against anything of German influence. Unable to return home, Weber took on a series of jobs, including decorating flowerpots, designing ads for an outdoor advertising company, working as a lumberjack, and even operating a chicken farm until the war ended in 1918. Government, and Weber was stranded in the Bay Area. But in August 1914, with the outbreak of World War I, the construction drawings he brought with him were confiscated by the U.S. In May 1914, Weber then left Germany for San Francisco to supervise the construction at the Exposition. Pleased with Weber’s work, Paul recommended that he design the German section of the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. To understand why the Disney animation furniture is so revered, one has to look at Weber’s earlier career and the design movements that influenced him, to more fully appreciate the furniture that he designed for Disney.īy 1910, Karl Emanuel Martin (KEM) Weber was an apprentice to leading furniture designer Bruno Paul, a great modernist thinker of the day in Germany and Austria. When Kem Weber was hired by Walt Disney to be the chief designer of the Disney Studio complex in Burbank in 1939, he was already on the leading edge of the Streamline Modern movement. Concept design for The Walt Disney Studios main restaurant (commissary), 1939 Kem Weber ©UCSB ![]()
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