20th century AD

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 1997 by Dianne H. Pilgrim

The wrought-iron and bronze entrance gates to the executive suite of the Chanin Building in New York City were designed by Rene Chambellan in 1928. Their formal features, dynamic details, and fine craftsmanship have not changed, but they embody characteristics of a period that was at first embraced, then dismissed, and in recent decades re-evaluated and blessed.(1)

Personal preference, colored by culture, class, and experience, has much to do with why objects as aesthetically pleasing and intellectually engaging as these gates could have gone unappreciated for more than half a century. The definition of a masterpiece changes from generation to generation, often based on taste. Something about the dynamic of the style known most commonly as art deco caused an entire generation to look down on its masterpieces and minimize their importance. This was certainly the case with the Chaffin gates.

When Irwin S. Chanin (1891-1988)(2) built the Chanin Building at Forty-second Street and Lexington Avenue in 1929 it was a monument to the achievements of the Chanin brothers, the sons of immigrants. Irwin Chanin was an architect, designer, and real-estate developer; he was also a visionary and a self-made man. When built by the Chanin Company the Chanin Building was only the third tallest structure in the city, but its architecture and ornamentation made it a model for future skyscraper design. Its exterior profile and interior decor glorified the machine - its mechanical and geometric forms, and the products it could make. Of all the buildings the company built, this one reflected Chanin's optimism about capitalism, democracy, New York City, and America.

The ornate decoration of the lobby embodied the spirit of the jazz age - energetic and effusive. The executive suite on the fifty-second floor was a modern-day Medici palace where the Chanins held court. The luxurious interior was outfitted in up-to-the-minute style and included ornately tiled bathrooms. To enter the suite of these titans of New York real estate, visitors passed through Chambellan's gates, which symbolically articulated the Chanins' philosophy that industry fueled by capital will produce a better world. The gates, with their cogs and gears and other allusions to the modern world, project power and electricity, reflecting the agitation, energy, sense of motion and speed, and strength of the machine. However, entwined in the exuberant, elaborate design of the gates is uneasiness, for this monument to the machine age rests on narrow stacks of coins. The excitement and hope articulated in the metalwork by the zigzag lightning bolts and radiating lines allude as well to the sense of dislocation, impermanence, and fear that also characterized the 1920s.

When it was new the Chanin Building was recognized for its style and design. An article in the Arts praised the interior, particularly the innovative public spaces.(3) These, too, incorporate metalwork designed by Chambellan and,like the gates, characterized by dynamic shapes, lines, and the studied contrast of the colors of the various metals used.

The Great Depression of the 1930s instilled new feelings and priorities, and the Chanin Building became just another of the city's skyscrapers. As people's interests change, they ultimately forget about things that remind them of unpleasant times or seem old-fashioned. The 1920s were, in retrospect, a frenzied dance that ended in collapse.

It usually takes at least a generation to establish the chronological and emotional distance necessary to examine the art of an earlier time dispassionately. The art has not changed; we have. Bevis Hillier suggested in his book Art Deco of the 20s and 30s, published in 1968, that not until the 1960s could the art of that period take on "the romantic, slightly sinister appeal of antiquity."(4) Hillier coined the term "art deco" based on the seminal Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes held in Paris in 1925, and his book signaled the beginning of the rediscovery of that fascinating period in American design. No longer dismissed for the very characteristics that make them a masterpiece, the Chanin gates and other works of the era have regained their important place in the history of design.

1 The gates came to my attention when I was curator of decorative arts at the Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn, New York. They were included in the 1986 exhibition there entitled The Machine Age in America, 1918-1941, and they were illustrated on p. 271 in the book of the same name by Richard Guy Wilson, Dianne H. Pilgrim, and Dickran Tashjian that accompanied the exhibition.

2 Irwin Chanin graduated from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, a tuition-free school in lower Manhattan, in 1915. He and his brother, Henry, established the Chanin Company, a construction company. In recognition of Irwin Chanin's contribution to the development of New York architecture and his support for his alma mater, Cooper Union named its architecture school for him in 1982. It is therefore most appropriate that the Chanin gates have joined the objects from the collection of the Cooper Union now in the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City.