architecture, which were to be incorporated into significant Deco buildings such as the Empire State Building in New York, was a view evolving among architects that form should follow function and that function should entail livability--itself a view that seems to have evolved at least in part from the lessons of mechanization wrought by the Industrial Revolution over the course of the 19th century. In 1863, at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, an architect named Viollet-le-Duc declared that "no architectural or artistic form can be considered beautiful if it is impossible to understand its function" (Jacquet 85). That concept took hold over the balance of the century, evidently more in the US than in Europe. Increased mechanization of everything from agriculture to war showed that functionality as a controlling idea was overtaking the idea of decoration in architecture. In that regard, Smith makes the point that in the iconography of Art Deco architecture and decoration that flourished in the US in the 1920s and 1930s, there is abundant repetition of imagery involving "industry and workers, cities and crowds, products and consumers" (Smith 42). Contrast such imagery with the bucolic scenes of the Renaissance and Mannerist pastoralizations of monumental Greco-Roman design, highly decorative baroque architecture, Gothic style, or various revivals of classical architectural forms.
Thus Art Deco can be interpreted as an expression of ideas evolving out of reaction against architecture traditions in an industrializing context. Industrialization had also enabled builders to exploit new building materials such as iron and steel in ways that had not been possible with bricks and mortar. "Metal technology," as it was called, which was used in the construction of such monumental objects as the Brooklyn Bridge, could be incorporated into "the impulse to go ever higher" without obliging builders to create massive foundat...