Category: Art Deco NYC

Explore the gilded Art Deco elevator panels of the Fred F. French Building (1927), created by Vincent Glinsky and Oscar Bach. Eight symbolic reliefs represent Commerce, Industry, Finance, and Building — a rare surviving masterpiece of early New York skyscraper art.

These elevator doors visualize the four pillars of Fred F. French’s real-estate empire—Industry, Commerce, Finance, and Building—through a sculptural language blending Art Deco geometry with echoes of ancient Mesopotamian reliefs.

A complete visual and iconographic study of the Chanin Building grilles (1929), combining new photographic documentation with historical analysis.

The project focuses on René Chambellan’s sculptural program and decodes The City of Opportunity as a symbolic narrative embedded in the building’s metalwork—where Art Deco ornament becomes a language of ambition, labor, and urban identity in late-1920s New York.