Art Deco Interior Design
Zigzag Patterns in Art Deco: Bold & Timeless
Art Deco replaced the curved plant forms of Art Nouveau with angular ornament, and the zigzag is the plainest example. It’s a run of repeated diagonal lines, and architects and designers set it on facades, metalwork, floors and textiles during the 1920s and early 1930s.
The shape itself is far older than the style, though. Wikipedia’s entry on the zigzag, citing Terry Allen, notes the zigzag arch in Islamic, Byzantine, Norman and Romanesque architecture.
Architecture historians use the label Zigzag Moderne for the 1920s strand that carried the motif up to skyscraper scale. In David Gebhard’s classification, it’s filed as a substyle of Art Deco architecture.
What are zigzag patterns in Art Deco?
Sharp diagonal lines, repeated, to signal speed, height and machine-age modernity. That’s the whole motif, and it showed up on facades, metalwork, floors, textiles and furniture from the 1920s into the early 1930s.
It rarely works alone. Stepped setbacks, stylized fountains and the sunburst motif follow the same logic of hard angles repeated in rhythm.
Zigzag Moderne as a style label
Wikipedia’s entry on the style builds on David Gebhard’s 1978 classification. It describes heavy, monumental forms with smooth surfaces and window openings set in inset panels, finished with a flat roof that has no Classical or Gothic termination. A central tower steps down toward the edges. The decoration comes from zigzags, chevrons, sunbursts, spirals, and stylized plants and animals.
So the label covers a building’s massing and its ornament together. The zigzag is only one ornament on that list.
How does the Art Deco zigzag differ from chevron, herringbone and stepped forms?
A zigzag line reverses direction at sharp angles. Chevron, herringbone and stepped forms each build that reversal their own way: a V, a set of offset rectangles, or a series of right-angle setbacks.
| Form | How it is built | Typical Art Deco use |
|---|---|---|
| Zigzag | Continuous line that reverses at sharp angles | Ornament bands on facades, metalwork and interiors |
| Chevron | V shape, repeated or stacked in parallel rows | Stacked bands in architecture, textiles and fashion |
| Herringbone | Offset rectangles with staggered joints | Floor and tile layouts |
| Stepped form | Right-angle setbacks, rising or falling | Tower setbacks and stepped relief |
Gebhard’s trait list names zigzags and chevrons as separate items, so the distinction is real. In practice a row of linked chevrons reads as a zigzag, which is where the confusion starts.
For a fast check, look at the line first. If it’s one unbroken line that reverses direction, you’re looking at a zigzag or a chevron. Staggered rectangle joints mean herringbone, and right-angle setbacks with no diagonals point to a stepped form.
Chevron causes most of the mix-ups, and the way designers stacked it into repeating bands is covered in this look at Art Deco chevron patterns.
Stepped forms work at the scale of the building instead of the surface. How stepped forms shape Art Deco architecture comes down to setbacks that give a tower its stair-step skyline.
Where did the Art Deco zigzag come from?
Nobody owns the motif. Egyptian forms popularized by the 1922 Tutankhamun discovery fed into it, and so did Mesoamerican stepped pyramids and relief carving. Cubism added the angular geometry. The 1925 Paris exposition gave the movement its name.
Egyptian revival after 1922
The Art Deco Society of New York dates the surge of Egyptian motifs to 1922, when the Tutankhamun discovery caught public attention.
The society points to the reed motif on the Chrysler Building’s elevator doors, which echoes reeds on an Egyptian scroll.
The link is visual, not literal. Egypt supplied imagery, while the angular repetition arrived from elsewhere.
Mesoamerican stepped forms
The ziggurat is the most common Mesoamerican influence, per the Art Deco Society of New York, which sets a Mayan stepped pyramid beside the top of the Paramount Building. The same society compares an Aztec relief with a relief at Rockefeller Center.
As for the zigzag itself, a stepped pyramid seen from the side traces a stair-step line, which is a squared-off zigzag. A tower that steps down toward its edges, as in Gebhard’s trait list, applies the same line at building scale.
Cubism and the 1925 Paris exposition
Cubism gave Art Deco its geometry, and the exposition gave it a public debut.
Wikipedia’s Art Deco entry gives the sequence. In 1905, Eugene Grasset published Methode de Composition Ornementale, Elements Rectilignes, a systematic study of geometric ornament set against the undulating Art Nouveau style. Cubism appeared in France between 1907 and 1912. The Paris exposition then ran from April to October 1925 and gave Art Deco its name.
Put those dates next to the 1922 tomb discovery and the order changes.
The angular grammar was in print 17 years before Tutankhamun, so Egyptian imagery decorated a geometry that already existed.
What did the zigzag stand for in Art Deco?
Speed and energy, mostly, plus a general faith in technology. The zigzag replaced the soft plant curves of Art Nouveau with hard angles. Meaning is partly interpretation here, because documented intent exists for specific buildings but not for the motif as a whole.
The machine age is the best documented reading. The National Park Service’s landmark nomination for the Chrysler Building calls the tower a monument to America’s “machine age”. Architect William Van Alen said bright metal helped carry the crown’s rising lines upward, per the Art Deco Society of New York’s account of Ernest Thum’s The Book of Stainless Steels (1933 and 1935 editions). And repeated, symmetrical angles took the place of asymmetrical foliage.
The clearest break shows against Art Nouveau interiors, which leaned on flowing plant forms. Art Deco answered with repetition and symmetry.
Speed and optimism are fair readings too, but they rest on interpretation rather than a designer’s own words.
Which materials and surfaces carry the zigzag?
Glazed terra cotta, stainless steel and nickel silver, mosaic and tile, wood inlay and printed textiles all carry it, on exteriors and interiors alike. The material decides how crisp the angle looks and how long it lasts.
Exterior surfaces
Claud Beelman’s Eastern Columbia Building in Los Angeles shows terra cotta at its most decorative. The Michelin Guide describes a 1930 facade faced in turquoise and gold glazed terra cotta, with zigzags and chevrons alongside stylized animal and plant forms.
Glazed terra cotta carries a cost. The engineering firm SGH investigated cracked and spalled cladding on the building as part of its conversion to condominiums.
Polished metal aged better in the documented case, and it carried angular geometry higher. The Chrysler Building’s crown, with seven concentric ribbed arches set with triangular windows, is clad in about 4,500 plates of Nirosta stainless steel, writes Kathleen Murphy Skolnik in the Art Deco New York journal (2021).
In 1929 the American Society for Testing Materials chose the building to test Nirosta’s durability. Inspectors checked the sheets every five years until 1960, when the checks ended because three decades had turned up virtually no deterioration.
Interior surfaces and objects
Nickel silver became a cheaper alternative to silver in 1920s America, and it turns up in grilles, panels, railings and elevator doors. Art Deco kept the Greco-Roman taste for geometric mosaics, and the Art Deco Society of New York pairs a Roman mosaic with Hildreth Meiere’s work at Temple Emanu-El.
Decorative inlays on furniture emphasized its geometry, according to Wikipedia’s Art Deco entry. Late Art Deco fabric and wallcoverings used geometric designs and metallic finishes.
Objects took the line too. The same Wikipedia entry pictures a metal console table base by Paul Feher, c. 1930, built from complex zigzags.
Floors take the motif in mosaic, tile and wood, and the inlay patterns used in Art Deco flooring show how a repeating band is laid out underfoot.
Moldings carry it at the edges of a room. This Is Beirut (2024) describes zigzag frames around windows in the city’s Art Deco buildings, and decorative moldings in Art Deco homes follow the same logic of repeated angled bands.
Which buildings show the Art Deco zigzag best?
Mostly New York towers and Los Angeles commercial buildings from the late 1920s and early 1930s. Detroit adds a stepped tower and Oakland a movie palace, and that short list covers most of what the literature cites.
A wider tour of the style’s landmarks sits in this guide to famous Art Deco buildings, though only some of them carry zigzag ornament.
New York towers
Wikipedia’s Zigzag Moderne entry classes the Chrysler Building as zigzag. Citing Anne Bleksmith’s essay in the Grove Encyclopedia of American Art (2011), it adds these New York towers:
- Barclay-Vesey Building (1923 to 1926), by Ralph Thomas Walker
- Empire State Building (1931), by Shreve, Lamb and Harmon
- RCA Victor Building (1931), by Cross and Cross
The same Wikipedia entry on Art Deco uses the Chrysler Building’s entrance hall to illustrate the stepped motif, and its entrance to illustrate angular design.
Los Angeles
Bullock’s Wilshire opened in September 1929 with a tower sheathed in copper that has weathered green. John and Donald Parkinson designed it for drivers, so the main entrance sits at the rear under the city’s first department store porte-cochere.
Southwestern Law School bought the building in 1994, restored it, and opened its law library there in 1997.
The same Grove-based list adds the Richfield Tower (1929) and the Pellissier Building with the Wiltern Theatre (1930).
Detroit and Oakland
The Fisher Building in Detroit (1928) is a 30-story tower by Albert Kahn Associates, with Joseph Nathaniel French as chief architect. French took the emphasis on verticality and the stepped-back upper stories from Eliel Saarinen’s 1922 Tribune Tower design, and the lobby uses forty kinds of marble.
Timothy Pflueger’s Paramount Theatre in Oakland opened on December 16, 1931 at a cost of $3 million, and it became a National Historic Landmark in 1977.
Neither is a pure zigzag case. The Fisher’s link runs through stepped massing and an original Mayan Revival theatre interior, and the Paramount’s facade carries a mosaic.
When did the zigzag peak, and why did it give way to Streamline Moderne?
It peaked in the 1920s and gave way to Streamline Moderne in the 1930s, as Depression-era budgets and aerodynamic design pushed ornament out. Wikipedia’s Zigzag Moderne entry, citing David Gebhard (1978), dates the swap by decade.
The dates bunch up. 7 of 8 listed Zigzag Moderne examples were completed between 1929 and 1931 (Bleksmith’s list, as given on Wikipedia). Oakland’s Paramount shut in June 1932, six months after opening, unable to cover operating costs above $27,000 a week. Chicago’s Century of Progress fair introduced Streamline Moderne to the American public in 1933 to 1934, and after World War II Art Deco lost its dominance to the International Style.
That 1929 to 1931 window runs two years past Gebhard’s 1920s label, because towers take time to finish.
For rooms rather than towers, the 1920s interior design style shows how the decade’s taste read indoors.
Two forces pushed the same way. The Great Depression thinned out wealthy clients, and few companies were ready to build new skyscrapers, according to Wikipedia’s Art Deco entry.
Streamline Moderne then swapped sharp angles for aerodynamic curves, with smooth concrete and glass in place of ornament.
The Paramount shows how tight things got. It was built for stage shows and orchestras, and it opened just as that model of movie palace stopped paying for itself.
Sources disagree on when Streamline Moderne started. Wikipedia’s Art Deco entry says machine-age influences had produced the style by 1930, while its article on Art Deco in the United States places the emergence in the mid-1930s.
The Streamline Moderne entry points to the 1933 to 1934 Chicago fair as the moment the style reached the public. So the handover from zigzag to streamline has no single date, only a window running from about 1930 to the mid-1930s.
When is a zigzag not Art Deco?
Dates rule out a lot. A zigzag that predates the 1920s isn’t Art Deco, and a later revival or a Streamline Moderne building doesn’t count either. The motif is far older than the style, so the shape alone proves nothing.
Zigzags that predate the style
Wikipedia’s entry on the zigzag, citing Terry Allen, notes the zigzag arch in Islamic, Byzantine, Norman and Romanesque architecture.
The word itself first appears in print in French books and ephemera of the late 17th century, according to linguist Anatoly Liberman (2009).
What Art Deco added was context: machine-age materials and strict repetition, at skyscraper scale.
Buildings that look Deco but carry little zigzag
Streamline Moderne goes for horizontal orientation, rounded corners, glass brick or porthole windows, flat roofs and chrome-plated hardware, per Wikipedia’s entry on the style. Industrial designers stripped ornament out for an aerodynamic pure-line concept, and the color is frequently white or subdued pastels.
Miami Beach makes the point. The Miami Beach Architectural District holds 960 historic buildings and is described as the world’s largest collection of Art Deco, yet its Streamline, Tropical and Med-deco styles date mostly from the Depression to the early 1940s.
The Miami Beach Art Deco Museum places the building boom mostly in Streamline Moderne, the style’s second phase. Go to Miami for Streamline, and look elsewhere for zigzag towers.
Where sources disagree
The Art Deco Society of New York says the style was not officially named until 1966, while Docomomo Singapore credits historian Bevis Hillier with coining the term in 1968.
Both dates hold. The term first appeared in print in 1966, in the title of a Paris exhibition, and Hillier’s 1968 book made it the standard label, per Wikipedia’s Art Deco entry.
Whether Zigzag Moderne counts as its own style is also unsettled. Gebhard treats it as a substyle of Art Deco architecture, Robert M. Craig would call it simply Art Deco, and Rosemarie Haag Bletter sometimes separates New York’s towers into a skyscraper style.
Zigzag Moderne is a scholar’s classification, not a fixed category. Check which classification a source uses before comparing two buildings.
How do you identify an authentic Art Deco zigzag?
Shape alone doesn’t decide it. Date, line regularity, companion motifs, material and a revival test all count, and they work best in this order.
- Start with the date. Art Deco flourished through the 1920s to the early 1930s, and Zigzag Moderne was the 1920s strand. A later date points to Streamline Moderne or a revival.
- Read the line. A regular zigzag has segments of usually constant length joined by usually constant angles in alternating directions. A wobbling or organic line is not the Deco version.
- Look at what sits nearby. Stepped setbacks, chevrons, sunbursts and stylized plants or animals usually sit alongside it.
- Check the material against the era. Glass block became a hallmark of 1930s Streamline Moderne, per the Art Deco Society of New York, so a zigzag framed by it points to the later phase.
- Rule out a revival. Neo-Art Deco buildings borrow the vocabulary after the fact, such as 99 Hudson Street in Jersey City and Capella Hanoi (2021), both listed in Wikipedia’s Art Deco entry.
Interiors need the same discipline. Start from what Art Deco interior design covers, then test each pattern against the checks above.
Objects need their own test, and the traits of Art Deco furniture give a baseline to compare against.
Common Questions About Zigzag Patterns in Art Deco
Does the zigzag appear outside Europe and the United States?
Yes. This Is Beirut (2024) describes Beirut facades decorated with geometric, floral and zigzag motifs, and Wikipedia’s Zigzag Moderne entry pictures Tokyo’s Tobu-Asakusa Station (completed 1931).
Beirut’s versions pair zigzags with roses on molded concrete facades.
Can zigzag patterns work in modern interiors?
Yes. Wikipedia’s Art Deco entry notes that the style still inspires contemporary design.
Use the zigzag as a band or border, such as a rug edge or tile frieze, instead of an all-over print. Art Deco applied it as ornament bands, and the restraint keeps the room from reading as costume.
Which colors pair with Art Deco zigzags?
No single palette defines the motif. Wikipedia’s Art Deco entry describes bright colors, fine craftsmanship and rare, expensive materials as the style’s signature.
For specific pairings, see the palettes associated with Art Deco.
How do you draw a zigzag pattern in vector software?
Draw one line segment at the angle you want, then repeat it with the direction alternating each time. Wikipedia’s entry on the zigzag describes a regular zigzag as a segment repeated by glide reflection.
Keep segment length and angle constant, since the Art Deco version depends on strict repetition.
Restoring or Reproducing an Art Deco Zigzag
Measure the original line first, since everything else depends on it. Then match the material before the finish, and keep the band to one surface per room.
Published descriptions set no standard angle (as of October 2026), only constant length and constant angle, so a guessed value shows at once. Take segment length and angle straight off the original.
On material, the trade-off is depth for budget. A printed band costs less than inlay or glazed tile and reads flatter.
Period buildings paired the zigzag with sunbursts, chevrons and stepped forms, which is why restraint matters. A room built from zigzags alone reads as a single-note theme, and geometric shapes in Art Deco interiors covers the companions.
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