The Stone of the Sun: Art Deco and Its Pre-Columbian Soul.
ArtDeco series.Maison Philippe Montagne.
There is a moment, somewhere between the lobby of the Chrysler Building and the entrance of the Rockefeller Center, when you begin to sense that these towers are not entirely speaking the language of the twentieth century. The setback silhouette climbing in receding tiers toward the Manhattan sky, the friezes of angular relief cutting across stone façades, the geometric ornament massed around entry portals like guardians of a threshold — all of it carries the memory of something older, and considerably further away, than Paris in 1925.
The architects of Art Deco drew from many wells. Egypt, Mesopotamia, ancient Greece — all have been named, and rightly so. But the pre-Columbian civilisations of Mesoamerica and the Andean highlands left a mark on the style that is at once the most visually dramatic and the least discussed. It is worth dwelling on that.
The Civilisations That Named Themselves
The people whom the Spanish called Aztecs referred to themselves as the Mexica, and the land of their great lake-city Tenochtitlan — built on an island in the Valley of Mexico, founded, according to their own chronicle, where an eagle was seen devouring a serpent atop a cactus — was called Anáhuac. Their empire was vast, their architecture monumental, and their pyramids were not what we might casually imagine a pyramid to be. They were teocalli, a Nahuatl word meaning "house of god" — terraced, ascending structures crowned not by a point but by a temple, a shrine, a place of ritual that linked the earthly world to the divine. The pyramid was not a tomb. It was a mountain made by human hands, a sacred geography transplanted into the city.
Further south, in the great forests of the Yucatán and Guatemala, the Maya built structures of comparable formal ambition: steep-sided temples rising in precise stepped tiers, their cornices carved with glyphs and masks, their silhouettes visible for miles across the jungle canopy. And further south still, in the long spine of the Andes, the Inca — who called their empire Tawantinsuyu, "the four regions" in Quechua, a term of extraordinary geographic confidence — built not stepped pyramids but terraced landscapes, huacas, sacred sites that could be a mountain, a stone, a spring, or an ancestor, all equally deserving of reverence. Their architecture was the architecture of the earth itself, shaped and commanded.
These were not marginal cultures. They were civilisations of the first order, and when European archaeologists and explorers began to bring their forms back to the drawing rooms of the nineteenth century, the effect was inevitable.
The Architects Who Looked West
The transmission, as with Mesopotamia, was gradual and then sudden. The American explorer John Lloyd Stephens and the British illustrator Frederick Catherwood made the decisive journey in 1839 and 1840, travelling through the jungles of Central America and producing, in their two-volume Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan (1841), the first systematic visual record of Mayan architecture that the general public had ever seen. Catherwood's drawings of Copán and Uxmal — precise, atmospheric, haunting — circulated widely. They gave Western designers a vocabulary they had not had before.
The first architect to formally incorporate that vocabulary into a public building was Paul Philippe Cret, the French-born Philadelphia architect, whose Pan American Union Building in Washington D.C. (1908–1910) wove Mayan and Mexica motifs into its floors, its fountain surrounds, and its decorative programme. Historian Marjorie Ingle, in her 1984 study Mayan Revival Style, traces the entire movement to this building — a quiet, almost diplomatic act of formal acknowledgement that the American continents had their own antiquity, and that it was as architecturally serious as any other.
Frank Lloyd Wright was the figure who took this furthest, and who spoke about it most directly. "I remember how, as a boy," he said in a 1930 lecture, "primitive American architecture — Toltec, Aztec, Mayan, Inca — stirred my wonder, excited my wishful imagination." He was not being nostalgic. He was describing a formative influence. His Hollyhock House in Los Angeles (1921), the Ennis House (1924), and the Millard House in Pasadena (1923) all carry the terraced, interlocking geometry of Mesoamerican temples, translated into poured concrete and the vocabulary of the California hillside. Barbara Braun, in Pre-Columbian Art and the Post-Columbian World (Abrams, New York, 1993) — still the most rigorous scholarly account of this transmission — devotes an entire chapter to Wright's dialogue with Mayan architecture, noting that his engagement was structural as much as decorative. He was not borrowing ornament. He was borrowing a way of building.
Robert Stacy-Judd was less restrained, and perhaps more influential on the popular imagination. His Aztec Hotel in Monrovia, California (1924–1925) — built directly on what was then the original Route 66 — dressed its façade, interiors, and furniture in patterns derived from Maya script and Aztec relief, and made no apology for the theatricality of it. He had been directly inspired by Stephens and Catherwood. The building still stands.
The Mayan Theater in Los Angeles, carries polychrome terracotta ornament across its surface.
The 450 Sutter Street building in San Francisco, completed in 1929 by Miller and Pflueger, clad twenty-six floors in undulating Mayan Revival terracotta, its vertical rhythms rising from street level to roofline in a single unbroken geometric cadence. And in New York, the reliefs of Rockefeller Center carried the stepped ornamental logic of Aztec sculptural panels into the most ambitious building programme of the 1930s.
What the Teocalli Taught the Skyscraper
The formal relationship between the stepped pyramid and the setback skyscraper has been noted by historians of Art Deco since at least the 1970s, and it is precise enough to be worth pausing over. New York's 1916 zoning resolution, which required tall buildings to step back as they rose in order to allow light to reach the street, produced a silhouette that rhymed almost perfectly with the teocalli — ascending in horizontal tiers, each receding from the one below. Whether the architects consciously reached for that association or whether the formal convergence simply confirmed what they already felt, the effect was the same: the Mesoamerican pyramid became the model for the modern tower, not only in silhouette but in ornamental logic.
Here the famed American radiator building on Bryant park, New York.
Both used the exterior surface as a field for geometric relief. Both treated the entrance portal as a moment of concentrated visual intensity. Both understood that a building is not simply an enclosure but a statement — about power, about cosmology, about the aspiration of a civilisation toward something beyond the merely practical.
The Mexica had understood this with particular clarity. The teocalli, as the scholar Ingle notes, was built to be seen. It was monumental architecture in the fullest sense — conceived for the public eye, designed to impress, to awe, to communicate across distances. The Aztec employed scale as a language. So, in their way, did the architects of Midtown Manhattan.
The Grammar That Travels
What the pre-Columbian civilisations gave to Art Deco was not, in the end, a collection of borrowed motifs — the jaguar, the feathered serpent, the stepped glyph — though all of these appeared, and some with remarkable fidelity. What they gave was a confirmation: that geometric form at monumental scale is among the most enduring languages that human beings have found for beauty, for power, for the aspiration toward permanence.
The Mexica built their teocalli as sacred mountains. The Maya cut their temples from the jungle and aligned them to the stars. The Inca shaped the earth itself into terraced sanctuaries. And the architects of the twentieth century, reaching back across the ocean and across the centuries, recognised in all of that a grammar they could use — a set of principles about form, surface, and scale that transcended the moment of its production and remained, stubbornly, available.
It is the same grammar that runs, quietly and without announcement, through the design philosophy of Maison Philippe Montagne. The pursuit of beauty through Art Deco is, in the end, a pursuit that draws from many ancient wells. The Mexica called their pyramids houses of god.
The Luxury Nomad, travelling with objects designed to embody that same rigorous geometry, is perhaps carrying something of that intention forward — the idea that beauty, when it is structural rather than merely decorative, does not age.
ArtDeco. Our roots. Our inspiration.
Maison Philippe Montagne.
Sources:
Stephens, John Lloyd & Catherwood, Frederick. Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan. Harper & Brothers, New York, 1841.
Braun, Barbara. Pre-Columbian Art and the Post-Columbian World: Ancient American Sources of Modern Art. Abrams, New York, 1993.
Ingle, Marjorie. Mayan Revival Style. Peregrine Smith Books, Salt Lake City, 1984.
Wright, Frank Lloyd. "In the Cause of Architecture." Lecture, 1930. Quoted in Braun, op. cit., p. 138.
ArtDeco.org. "Origins and Influences." artdeco.org/origins-influences.
National Geographic. "Who Built the Great City of Teotihuacan?" nationalgeographic.com.
Further reading :
What makes a bag beautiful? ArtDeco and the pursuit of beauty