Forest Lawn Cemetery - Table of Contents
Chester and Gloria
Stachura Mausoleum (Section 21)
Forest Lawn Cemetery, Buffalo, NY
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Forest Lawn Cemetery - Table of Contents
Chester and Gloria
Stachura Mausoleum (Section 21)
Forest Lawn Cemetery, Buffalo, NY
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Chester and Gloria Stachura are entombed in an extravagant mausoleum of Bethel white granite with a heavy bronze door on which a classically draped female figure is mounted. The Stachuras invite passersby to rest in a polished black granite sofa or face-to-face conversation chairs placed in front of the mausoleum. The memorial was built in 1988. -- Source: "A Field Guide to Forest Lawn Cemetery"
Art Deco
The memorial is in Art Deco style. Art Deco was the first widely popular style in the United States to break with the revivalist tradition (see, for example, Gothic Revival or Greek Revival or Italianate).The name Art Deco comes from the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs Industriels et Modernes, held in Paris, which celebrated living in the modern world. The style began in France but America became the center of the artistic movement.
Art Deco was essentially a style of decoration and was applied to jewelry, clothing, furniture and handicrafts as well as buildings. Industrial designers created Art Deco motifs (patterns) to adorn their streamlined cars, trains and kitchen appliances. Art Deco ornamentation consists largely of low relief geometrical designs, often in the form of parallel straight lines, zigzags, chevrons and stylized floral motifs.
The practitioners of the style attempted to describe the sleekness they thought expressive of the machine age. The growing impact of the machine can be seen in repeating and overlapping images from 1925; and in the 1930s, in streamlined forms derived from the principles of aerodynamics.
Common Art Deco features:
- Geometric ornament: parallel straight lines, zig-zags, chevrons, lozenges (diamondlike shape, but not a square)
- Stylized (abstracted) floral motifs
- Stylized figure sculpture
- Sunrise and floral patterns in ornamentation
- Intense colors in terra cotta, glass, colored glazed bricks, mosaic tiles, and colored mirrors
- Hard-edged low relief ornamentation around door and window openings, e.g. stepped frontispiece and stepped window head
- Buildings are" stripped down" to their purest forms
See also:
