Art Deco
Greenbelt Maryland was designed and founded in the wake of the Great Depression, an event that not only shaped the economic, social, and political climates of the time, but affected the art world as well. Art Deco, so named after the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs Industriels et Modernes in Paris that celebrated living in the modern world, remains one of the Depression's lasting legacies. The Art Deco movement was derived from Cubism, Futurism, and other avant-garde painting styles of the early twentieth century. The distinctive style of the Art Deco movement is characterized by abstraction, distortion, geometric shapes, smooth lines, decoration and intense color. These characteristics reflect the changing sense of industrialism and technology in the post-Depression era. Art Deco work emphasizes the virtue of handicraft and ranges from architecture to furniture to painting, as it was popularly considered to be elegant and sophisticated for the time. Art Deco work was marketed to a growing middle class population, another reason it was so successful in Greenbelt. The facades of the original apartment buildings are excellent examples of Art Deco architecture; they have glass geometric shapes on the façade and strong forms and defining lines. The Greenbelt community center is widely considered one of the top ten most innovative Art Deco buildings in the country. The use of glass blocks and buttresses in the Community Center was groundbreaking in Art Deco architecture. Built in 1937, the Community Center was originally the Greenbelt Elementary School, so it was literally the center of the community. In 1991 it was declared a National Historic Site, and it is still fully functional today as the epicenter of the Greenbelt community.
