120 Wall Street

Abstract

KNOWN FOR his modern classicist designs, Ely Jacques Kahn’s chief concern was finding a decorative style that had no reference to the past. The 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs, which introduced what is now called the Art Deco style, was a turning point in his life: “There I felt that the pompous sterility of 1900 with its white lines of columns was over.” At first, Kahn thought the revolution lay in brightly colored terra cotta, as in his paganly polychromatic Two Park Avenue Building (1928), but the façades of his later buildings rely more on texture and monochrome abstract patterns.