Customer Reviews

A Spirit of Progress: Art Deco Architecture in Australia

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Superb photographs of Australian 20s and 30s architecture, supported by the very best of architectural comment. Australia's acknowledged expert on 20,s and 30,s architectural and design heritage, Lumby has taken the often regarded 'humdrum' to the very heigths! The VERY BEST! This book is cheap at half the cost!

This will most likely be the regarded as the standard work on Deco architecture in Australia if only for Roy Lumby's superb essay in the first sixty-four pages. He manages to pull all the various Deco themes and personalities together so that the reader is left with an understanding of how this particular architectural style evolved across the country.

The bulk of the book uses the excellent color photography (and frequent attractive hand tinting) of Patrick Van Daele. Fortunately as he took all the photos the book has an evenness of color and style which combined with captions make the images work so well. Incidentally the captions provide a lot more information than the name of the building and location.

This is as far as my praise goes though owing to the book's production which is sadly lacking because of an excess of white space and some thoughtless editorial direction. The main problem is that so many of Van Daele's photos have been reduced in size because of some designer's whimsy, leaving empty page space in abundance. A pity because as I've said these are cracking photos. Not only are so many of them too small but where they occur several to a page the captions have the silly convention of directions: top, left, middle center, bottom right but made all the more useless because each caption has a plate number and this repeated under each photo would have been all that was needed to tie the photo to the caption.

The book's typography uses the very appropriate period typeface Futura but again thoughtless design does the reader no favors. The caption text is in a very light weight, similarly the bibliography and index will have readers straining to read anything in a domestic lighting environment because of tiny type size and thinness. My tip: read this book only in daylight!

I find it very frustrating when a book's first class text and images are devalued because of unprofessional design which contributes to a lack of editorial clarity.

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.