Art Deco Interior Design
Stepped Forms in Art Deco Architecture Explained
Most stepped forms in Art Deco architecture started as a legal formula, not a decorative choice. Architects stacked smaller and smaller tiers into a ziggurat-like silhouette, and 1920s and 1930s towers read as taller for it.
New York’s 1916 zoning code divided the city into five height zones. Each zone had its own setback formula, which fixed how high a wall could rise above the sidewalk before it stepped back (Skyscraper Museum). In the Garment District’s two-times zone, setbacks began after twice the street width.
Art Deco architects then dressed that envelope in ornament and carried the silhouette to cities whose rules differed from New York’s.
What Are Stepped Forms in Art Deco Architecture?
In practice it means tiers, each one smaller than the one below, stacked until the building ends in a ziggurat-like profile. Architects used the shape to express height, verticality and modernity.
Pennsylvania’s historic preservation office says the main facade of an Art Deco building often has a series of setbacks forming a stepped outline (Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission).
The form works at the scale of the whole tower, where setback tiers taper the mass, and again at the crown, which might be a stepped pyramid, a spire or a terraced top. Down at door height it shrinks into small stepped profiles on doorways, window panels and lobby fixtures.
People mix up a few terms here.
Setback is the plain one. It’s a recessed upper level and a construction fact in any era. Once setbacks are composed into a visible silhouette you have a stepped form, and that composition is the Art Deco signature. Then there’s Zigzag Moderne, the angular branch of the style, where stepped massing shares the facade with zigzags and stylized geometry (Untapped New York).
Where the Stepped Form Came From
Step pyramids supplied the profile. Mayan Revival and the 1922 Chicago Tribune Tower competition fed it into 1920s design. The legal cause that made it pay gets its own section below.
Ancient precedents
Step pyramids in Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt are the oldest stepped masses, among them the Teppe Sialk ziggurat and the Pyramid of Djoser (Wikipedia).
Deco architects took the profile and ignored the purpose. The tiers of a ziggurat held up a temple platform. In a 1920s tower they held office floors.
Revival styles and the 1920s competitions
The key dates cluster between 1922 and 1925.
In 1922 the Chicago Tribune Tower competition drew Eliel Saarinen’s second-place entry, which adapted New York’s setback rules and influenced the Barclay-Vesey, Chanin and Fred French buildings (nyc-architecture.com). Ferriss published his setback studies the same year, as drawings of what the zoning law would produce. Construction began on Ralph Walker’s Barclay-Vesey Building in 1923. Then in 1925 the Exposition des Arts Decoratifs in Paris pushed the style worldwide (Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission).
Mayan Revival put the pyramid profile into the vocabulary.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House copied the shape of Palenque temples, and Robert Stacy-Judd’s Aztec Hotel (1924-1925) became the best-known showpiece (Wikipedia). Untapped New York classes Mayan Revival as one facet of Zigzag Moderne.
Sources disagree on cause. Preservation guides list stepping as a style trait (Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, History Colorado), while the Skyscraper Museum ties the silhouette to the 1916 zoning envelope.
The dates favor the law. Ferriss was already drawing the envelope in 1922 and Barclay-Vesey broke ground in 1923, two years before the Paris exposition that named the style opened in 1925. To me that’s the stronger argument.
The stepped skyscraper existed before Art Deco had a name. Tony Robins of the Art Deco Society of New York makes the same point about Barclay-Vesey (GlobeSt, 2006).
How the 1916 Zoning Resolution Shaped Stepped Towers
Under New York’s 1916 Zoning Resolution, tall buildings had to step back from the street, and only a quarter of the lot could carry a tower with no height cap. The tiered Art Deco silhouette is what that rule looks like once it’s built.
What the rule required
The 1915 Equitable Building had the largest floor area in the world when it opened and shaded its neighbors, which pushed the city toward the first comprehensive zoning resolution in the country (Untapped New York). George McAneny and Edward Bassett were its chief authors.
The 1916 code was the first citywide zoning code in the United States (Brooklyn Public Library). A tower could rise to unlimited height over 25% of a lot (Skyscraper Museum). In 1922 Ferriss pushed that to its end in “Four Stages of the Maximum Mass of the Zoning Envelope,” drawn with Harvey Wiley Corbett (Skyscraper Museum), and his final stage shows a 70-story central tower with 40-story stepped wings on either side (Skyscraper Museum).
Lot size decided the shape. The Skyscraper Museum names a pyramidal base under a slender shaft as the most profitable form on large lots, as at the Chanin and Chrysler buildings and the Cities Service Building (1932).
How architects stacked the tiers
The envelope more or less dictated the order of work.
- Raise the street wall to the height the district allows for that street width.
- Step back along the sloped setback line as the building climbs.
- Reserve a tower once the footprint falls to 25% of the lot, where height is unrestricted.
- Cut light courts into the mass and square off the diagonals into rectangular tiers, as Ferriss’s later stages show (Skyscraper Museum).
- Finish with a crown.
The sequence bends when one lot meets two zoning conditions. At 500 Fifth Avenue (Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, 1931), the first setback on 42nd Street sits higher than the one on Fifth Avenue because each frontage faced different rules (Structurae).
Ferriss and the popular image of setbacks
Ferriss’s drawings first ran in the New York Times in 1922. They showed how the law would yield the stepped silhouette later built in the Waldorf Astoria and the Empire State Building (Cooper Hewitt).
His 1929 book The Metropolis of Tomorrow collected the studies. Ferriss treated the legal envelope as sculpture instead of a box (Wikipedia).
The envelope fixed volume, not style. The Chrysler Building and the Daily News Building obey the same law and look nothing alike.
Landmark Stepped Towers Compared
The New York towers built between 1924 and 1931 cover the whole range, from early zoning experiments to record-height crowns.
| Building | Architect and year | Height | How it steps |
|---|---|---|---|
| Barclay-Vesey Building | Ralph Walker, 1926 | 498 ft, 32 stories | Bulky base, tower set back above |
| American Radiator Building | Raymond Hood and John Howells, 1924 | 23 stories | Cubic stacked masses in black brick |
| Daily News Building | Raymond Hood and John Mead Howells, 1930 | 476 ft, 36 stories | Zigzag setbacks, flat top |
| Chrysler Building | William Van Alen, 1930 | 1,046 ft | Setbacks at floors 16, 23 and 30, then a spire |
| Empire State Building | Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, 1931 | 1,250 ft to the roof | One large setback above a 5-story base, smaller tiers above |
Figures come from the Skyscraper Museum, the Landmarks Preservation Commission, the National Park Service and Docomomo US. Completion dates for Barclay-Vesey run from 1926 to 1927 depending on the source.
Barclay-Vesey is the zoning case. Walker used the mandated setbacks to get a well-lit office tower above the switching floors, and the bulky base needed no windows because it housed telephone equipment (Skyscraper Museum).
Then there’s the crown that came out of a height race. Van Alen’s early scheme for the Reynolds Building ended in a bronze-and-glass observation dome. The revised design grew into a stainless steel crown, and he then hoisted a hidden 185-foot spire from inside it to pass the 927-foot Manhattan Company tower (Skyscraper Museum). That crown owes more to the race than to the law.
Hood’s Daily News Building is the style case. The Landmarks Preservation Commission calls it the first fully modernistic freestanding skyscraper by Hood. It steps, but it was also among the first towers built without an ornamental crown.
A wider tour of famous Art Deco buildings, including low-rise ones that never step back, sits in a separate guide.
How Does the Stepped Motif Appear in Ornament?
Ornament picks up the tower’s silhouette and repeats it small, in setback friezes, crowns, panel details and lobby fixtures. Most of it clusters wherever the mass steps.
Exterior detail
The Chrysler Building carries a stainless steel frieze on the setback at the base of its tower, with radiator-cap motifs requested by Walter Chrysler (Britannica). Its spire has a sunburst pattern.
History Colorado lists broken cornice lines, spandrel panels and vertical emphasis as companions to the stepped front, with chevrons and zigzags as facade ornament. Chevron patterns repeat the angular logic of the setbacks at hand scale.
Budget tells you where architects wanted the eye to land. Hood put nearly all of the Daily News Building’s $150,000 ornament allowance into the 3-story limestone entrance (Docomomo US).
Interior detail
Interiors reuse the tower’s profile. The Empire State Building’s 3-story lobby holds an aluminum relief of the skyscraper itself (New World Encyclopedia).
The Landmarks Preservation Commission’s 1991 designation report calls Walker’s continuity between interior and exterior at Barclay-Vesey unusual. Plenty of buildings that looked modern outside still fell back on historical styles inside.
Residential rooms reuse the tiered profile in furniture and light fixtures, a topic covered under Art Deco interior design.
Steel, Stone and Terra Cotta in Tiered Towers
A steel frame carries the load, so the cladding on a tiered tower can be brick, stone, terra cotta or metal, whichever suits each setback. At Vancouver’s Marine Building, curtain walls cover a steel frame with concrete floor slabs (Canadian Encyclopedia).
The wall infill at the Marine Building is pinkish-buff brick, and terra cotta bas-relief runs along the parapet of every setback on that same tower. Stone shows up in Chicago, where the Board of Trade Building wears gray Indiana limestone under a copper pyramid roof (Wikipedia), and in Brooklyn, where the Williamsburgh Savings Bank has a polished rainbow granite base (Landmarks Preservation Commission). Aluminum plays a smaller part, as the statue of Ceres that caps the Board of Trade Building.
Every setback adds a parapet, and the top of a wall system is where water gets in. Wiss, Janney, Elstner (WJE) traced the terra cotta damage at Illinois’s Rialto Square Theatre to water infiltration at that level.
Water then reaches embedded steel anchors, the steel corrodes, and the expanding rust cracks the terra cotta from behind (Hoffmann Architects).
The scale of the damage is large. At the 1913 Woolworth Building, which predates Art Deco, WJE replaced 26,000 severely deteriorated terra cotta units with architectural precast concrete.
Repairs can make things worse. Hoffmann Architects warns that sealant used in place of mortar in joint repairs traps water inside the terra cotta.
Did Stepped Forms Spread Beyond New York?
Yes. Stepped towers rose in Chicago, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Seattle and Detroit by 1930, and the rules behind them ranged from a setback formula in Chicago to a flat height cap in Los Angeles.
| City | Building and year | Height | How it steps |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chicago | Board of Trade Building, 1930 | 605 ft | Setbacks at varying heights, copper pyramid roof |
| Los Angeles | City Hall, 1928 | 452 ft | Tower tapering to a ziggurat-like apex |
| Vancouver | Marine Building, 1930 | 321 ft | Stepped-back Mayan temple form at the top |
| Seattle | Northern Life Tower, 1928 | 27 stories | Eight minor concentric setbacks |
Figures come from Bisnow, LAist, Vancouver History, Global Art Deco and the National Park Service. Sources give Los Angeles City Hall as 452 to 454 feet.
Chicago’s 1923 ordinance let a building rise 264 feet at the sidewalk, then add a tower limited by lot share and by one-sixth of the main building’s volume (City of Chicago landmark summary).
Wikipedia’s entry on setbacks stresses that Chicago has no sky exposure plane. Both statements hold. Chicago capped volume instead of tilting a plane, which is why its skyline looks different.
Los Angeles had a 150-foot limit dating to 1904, written into the city charter in 1911 and lasting until 1958 (LAist, PBS SoCal). Some sources give 1957 for the end. City Hall escaped it as a public building.
Wikipedia’s account of the 1916 resolution says the Williamsburgh Savings Bank rose where no zoning dictated form. The Landmarks Preservation Commission’s 1977 report calls the design an adaptation of the 1916 resolution, which was citywide.
Brooklyn therefore counts as New York here, not as a test of style without law.
Outside New York, resemblance is the clearest sign of style traveling. The National Park Service’s file on the Northern Life Tower notes a distinct likeness to Saarinen’s unbuilt 1922 design, and Detroit’s Fisher Building (Albert Kahn, 1928) pairs Art Deco with Mayan Revival detail (Wikipedia).
When an Art Deco Building Is Not Stepped
Many Art Deco buildings never step. Streamline Moderne, low-rise Miami Beach hotels and small civic buildings all drop the setback tower.
| Type | Replaces the setback tower with | Where it shows up |
|---|---|---|
| Streamline Moderne | Horizontal bands, curved corners, flat roofs | Storefronts, houses, movie theaters |
| Miami Beach Deco | Low rise, window eyebrows, jutting towers | Tyler Hotel (1940) |
| School and civic Deco | A stepped front or parapet on a low block | Bryant Webster Elementary School, Denver |
Pennsylvania’s field guide treats Art Deco and Art Moderne as distinct styles, and Buffalo as Architecture sets Moderne’s horizontal orientation against Art Deco’s vertical one. PBS describes Miami’s Deco hotels as smaller and cheaper to build than grand edifices.
Schools, theaters and armories keep the ornament and drop the massing. Their facades often carry zigzag patterns with a stepped front (Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, History Colorado).
The Miami Beach Architectural District, a one-square-mile area, entered the National Register on May 14, 1979. Sources disagree on its size: Wikipedia counts 960 historic buildings, while a historical marker cites more than 800 significant structures.
A decent rule of thumb is that a stepped parapet on a low block counts as ornament, and a footprint that shrinks at several levels counts as massing.
Why Setbacks Ended in 1961 and What Remains
New York’s 1961 zoning rewrite replaced the 1916 envelope with floor area ratio, and the tower in a plaza replaced the stepped pyramid. The Skyscraper Museum calls the new formula substantially more restrictive, so commercial buildings were effectively down-zoned.
| Period | Governing rule or model | Typical form |
|---|---|---|
| 1916 to 1961 | Envelope of street wall, setbacks and tower | Stepped pyramid or slender tower |
| 1952 to 1958 | Lever House and Seagram as private models | Glass slab, set back behind a plaza |
| From 1961 | Floor area ratio with plaza bonus | Slab or tower in a plaza |
The models came first. Lever House (1952) was the city’s first true curtain wall skyscraper (Skyscraper Museum), and the 1961 resolution cited the Seagram Building (1958) as a model for its massing (Museum of the City of New York).
Under the new code, towers could generally cover 40 percent of the zoning lot, and bonus floor area rewarded privately funded plazas (Skyscraper Museum).
Sources split on timing. Core77 reads the setback style as finished by the 1950s, while the Skyscraper Museum says speculative towers kept following the 1916 formula until 1961.
Some of it survives. Detroit’s Fisher Building has been a National Historic Landmark since June 29, 1989. Vancouver’s Marine Building has its exterior alteration and demolition restricted under heritage designation (Canadian Encyclopedia), and the Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower was restored as part of a conversion from commercial to residential use (Vertical Access).
The profile also returns as a reference. Cesar Pelli’s 181 West Madison in Chicago (1990) is believed to draw on Saarinen’s 1922 entry, and its most distinctive feature is a recessed crown (Bisnow, Wikipedia).
Common Questions About Stepped Forms in Art Deco Architecture
Is a setback the same as a step-back?
Yes. The two words name the same step-like recession in a building’s upper levels, and writers use them interchangeably (Wikipedia).
Stepped form is the wider term, for several setbacks composed into one silhouette.
Why are stepped Art Deco skyscrapers called wedding cake buildings?
Each tier sits on a larger one, so the profile reads as stacked layers, and setback-and-tower buildings picked up the nickname for that stacked profile (On Verticality).
Vancouver’s Marine Building carries it too, for the terra cotta “icing” on its tiers (Vancouver History).
Is the Empire State Building Art Deco?
Yes. Shreve, Lamb & Harmon designed it in the Art Deco style.
The style shows in its setbacks and aluminum-lined mullions more than in applied ornament (nyc-architecture.com).
Is Zigzag Moderne the same as stepped Art Deco?
Not quite. Zigzag Moderne is the angular branch of Art Deco, built on angular patterns and stylized geometry, and it flourished in large cities (Untapped New York).
Stepped massing is one of its tools, not its definition.
Telling a Zoning Setback From a Styled One
Stepped forms in Art Deco architecture trace to zoning when setback heights change with each street frontage, and to style when the stepping appears only at the crown or parapet.
Most towers sort out if you check the date and city first, then the setback height on each frontage, and only after that the crown against the body.
Date and city come first because they remove the most cases for the least effort. A New York tower finished before 1961 can follow the 1916 envelope, while one finished after it falls under floor area ratio instead.
Frontage is next. Street width set the formula, so unequal steps on neighboring streets point to a rule.
The crown goes last, since the tiers below it usually settle the question before any spire or finial enters.
Expect a mixed verdict. The checks separate the cause of the tiers from the cause of the ornament, and most towers hold both.
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