Art Deco and the fashioning of radio spaces

• Published in: The Routledge Companion to Art Deco pp. 139 - 158
• Main Author: Windover, Michael
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 2019
• Edition: 1
• Subjects: Alexandr Rodchenko; Art Deco; Young Man; Mont Royal; Elsa Schiaparelli; Interior Design Scheme; Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission; Radio Cabinets; Tuning Dial; Paul Cret; Vice Versa; RCA Victor; Streamlined Contours; MacLean’s Magazine; NBC’s Red; Art Deco Style; NBC Studio; Bird’s Eye; Radio City; Winnipeg Free Press; Clair River
• ISBN: 1472485149; 9781472485144
• DOI: 10.4324/9780429032165-8

This chapter explores some of the spaces of radio in the world. It explains radio in the world to the domestic interior. Advertisement from the series emphasizes the technological advances of the radio receivers and links the progress of their development to their efficient production in the company's new Art Deco-styled plant in Mont Royal. The 1930 Marconi advertising campaign is particularly useful in setting up a discussion of radio and Art Deco in that it emphasizes some of radio's places in the world. Within a year or so of the 1930 Marconi advertising campaign, home radios began to appear in the Art Deco mode in North America, and by the mid-1930s, expensive floor models were predominantly styled in this user-friendly form of modernism. As at the earlier National Broadcasting Company studios, Art Deco interiors helped to mark off the radio space as distinct, theatrical, and modern.