Art Deco Scotland: Design And Architecture In The Jazz Age

Art Deco Scotland: Design And Architecture In The Jazz Age
5 – 28 April 2025
Reid Ground Floor Corridor

Art Deco Scotland: Design And Architecture In The Jazz Age comprises images, a film, ephemera and textual interpretation around nine themes through which the Art Deco style appeared in inter-war Scotland. The exhibition accompanies a major new book of the same title, written by Bruce Peter, Professor of Design History at The Glasgow School of Art, and published by Historic Environment Scotland, which will be launched at the exhibition preview on Friday 4th of April.

The exhibition and book are Scotland’s contributions to an international celebration in 2025 of the centenary of the staging in Paris of the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, a great exhibition of modern decorative arts that much later gave the Art Deco style its name.

In Scotland in the inter-war era, Art Deco spread widely and was applied to buildings, objects and environments of many kinds. Despite turbulent economic circumstances, the style was associated with progress and with a hoped-for better future. It also had resonances with developments in visual culture across the wider European continent and in the USA, with which Scotland shared strong historic and modern cultural links, as well as with a British Empire by then in decline. At The Glasgow School of Art, the Head of Architecture in the 1900s, Eugène Bourdon, was a Parisian who had worked in New York. Bourdon who had himself been trained in the Beaux Arts manner, went on to train many of the generation of architects who came to prominence in 1920s-30s Scotland and whose work exhibited Art Deco traits.

The exhibition comprises a general introduction to contextualise the subject, followed by sections about Housing and Furnishing, Governmental and Municipal buildings, Transport, The Empire Exhibition of 1938, Retail and Commercial buildings and spaces, Hospitality and Catering, Entertainment, Industry and Engineering and Ocean liner interiors. The Glasgow School of Art’s School of Simulation and Visualisation’s virtual recreation of the Empire Exhibition will also be on show.

Bruce Peter is Professor of Design history at The Glasgow School of Art, where he has been employed since 2002. His interest in inter-war design stretches back to his teen years and so the book and exhibition represent the accumulation of nearly four decades of engagement with the subject. Previously, Bruce has published extensively on specific relevant aspects – cinemas, ocean liners and hotels. In 2016-2018, he assisted with the preparation of the successful Victoria & Albert Museum exhibition ‘Ocean Liners: Speed and Style’ and thereafter contributed to ‘Art Deco by the Sea’ at the Sainsbury Centre for the Arts in Norwich. Bruce’s love of jazz music – particularly the big band variety – is reflected in the title.

Supported by Turcan Connell and Lyon & Turnbull as the lead partners of the Scottish Art Deco Centenary and ‘Art Deco Scotland: Design and Architecture in the Jazz Age’.

Image: Paramount Cinema, Glasgow (1934), Frank Verity and Samuel Beverley, architects. Photograph: Bruce Peter collection