ABSTRACT
Described as jazz-modern, a style from which art deco evolved in the early 1920s, the lobby at the Strand Palace Hotel, with its stainless- steel revolving doors and panels subdivided into angular patterns, illuminated the façade and entrance to a luxurious interior. Dividing inside and outside by way of the threshold, the revolving doors – set quite a long way back from the pavement – were flanked by a glass balustrade sweeping up in stages, thus providing a graduated effect of light that was spectacular and inviting for the hotel guest. Marking a popular departure for the designs of modern commercial enterprises preceded by the French art nouveau, this was a transitional style that had evolved in its place. Embracing metal such as nickel-plated chromium, aluminium and steel, the 1920s philosophy and aspirations of the new machine age were to be realised in the specific roles that illumination and design were to play in a modern interior.
