ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the work of immigrants in the decades leading up to World War II in North America, the inclusive term modernism may be more useful than Art Deco. Los Angeles and New York were cities where a majority of European immigrant designers formed creative communities as they attempted to make inroads for modern design. Bullocks Wilshire is often cited as a masterpiece of Art Deco design, and the architecture and interiors clearly embodied a variety of impulses toward the modern, the mobile, the mechanical, the eclectic, and the primitive—all more or less accepted characteristics of Art Deco. The foundations of modernism in North America were partly laid by a small number of Austro-Hungarian and German immigrants who arrived in the US just prior to World War I, and who often supported one another based on common ethnicity and design interests.
