When David Bush and Jim Parsons began their quest to document Art Deco architecture in Houston, they had no idea it would become a four-book series documenting the state’s entry into the world of modern design.

More than a decade ago the two men, Preservation Houston’s executive director and programs director, respectively, were among many in the city worried about the demolition of the River Oaks Theatre and the Alabama Theatre. They planned to launch a photo-driven website to document historic buildings in the city and create a legacy for those that were lost.

It was advocacy, pure and simple. At some point, though, the two men realized they had enough photos and stories for a book, and Bright Sky Publishing published their tome in 2008.

During a book signing in Austin, the two men looked around and realized that every city in Texas had buildings from the 1920s and ’30s worth documenting. In 2010, they published “Hill Country Deco” (Texas Christian University Press), followed by “Fair Park Deco” in 2012 and in 2017, “DFW Deco.”

“DFW Deco: Modernistic Architecture of North Texas” reaches beyond that metropolis into Tyler, Denton, Marshall and elsewhere. The book, available on amazon.com, recently earned the Texas State Historical Association’s prestigious Ron Tyler Award for Best Illustrated Book on Texas History and Culture.

More Information “DFW Deco: Modernistic Architecture of North Texas” By Jim Parsons and David Bush Texas Christian University Publishing; $40; 256 pp.

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Art Deco style in American flourished in the 1920s and 1930s, in part because it represented modern life and everyone wanted to be modern. When the Great Depression hit, federal works projects all over the country sprang up and were designed in the style of the day: Art Deco, which affected everything from buildings and furniture to fashion, cars and simple household items like radios and vacuum cleaners. Within buildings, artists created “heroics-style” murals and sculptures that helped capture life in that era; there were also reliefs and metalwork on buildings’ exteriors.

“DFW Deco” — filled with photos and stories behind the life of each building — addresses deco as not just a singular form. It began as art-driven, rich with detail and ornamentation, progressing to Art Moderne, then the simpler Streamline before the plain, steel-and-glass-box International era arrived.

Bush and Parsons talked to the Chronicle recently about modern architecture, minor obsessions and slices of state history.

Q: Art Deco is so different from architecture we see today. What makes it really stand out?

Bush: Art Deco is the last architecture that incorporated artists and artisans in the design and planning. It was an important part of that. After the (1929 stock market) crash and after FDR came into office you had federal projects under the Work Progress Administration and Public Works Administration that incorporated artwork, but on a much smaller scale.

Q: And there were a lot of murals, right?

Bush: One percent of construction costs were set aside for art in the federal projects. There was a conscious effort to put artists back to work.

Parsons: In big cities, the artists would compete for the chance to do the work, but for the small towns they would send artists out from large cities to do the work. It wasn’t just a mural factory; they were trying to do things that were appropriate, that were topical and that were historical.

Q: In terms of timing, Art Deco is innately tied to the Great Depression. How did all of the architecture and design factor into that history?

Bush: There were the buildings that went up late ’20s when the economy was booming and … when the 1929 crash hit, there were a lot of construction projects on backlog. People thought those projects would carry us through whatever the downturn was. Of course that didn’t happen. Construction dried up in San Antonio, which was really booming before the crash. Dallas and Houston were still building into the depression and, really, Fort Worth started building after the crash.

Parsons: Fort Worth is an unusual case because in 1927, they developed a five-year work plan to basically rebuild the city, and the projects were Art Deco because they wanted the city to look modern. They already had funding and planning in motion, and they were building in 1932, ’33, ’34 when nobody else was.

Q: Art deco was embraced as being so modern, but yet it was so short-lived. What made it go out of style?

Bush: When they were built, they were modern or modernistic buildings, but after World War II … people didn’t like it or value it at all. Civilian construction stopped during the war; it was a definite break. It wasn’t until the late 1960s or early ’70s until people started looking at it again.

Parsons: These styles would have reminded them of the depression, too. Dallas had these wonderful murals at city hall that were painted as a WPA project, scenes from Dallas history. In the mid ’50s they redid city hall and there was a question “do we save the murals or shouldn’t we?” And the answer was “these are depressing and they remind us of bad times” and they got rid of them. They were bad times. They produced some good architecture, but they were bad times.

Q: For this book you spent a lot of time in North Texas. What are some of your favorite buildings in the book?

Bush: I like the Texas and Pacific Railway Station in Fort Worth, which is pretty incredible, and it’s amazing that it remained intact through the decline of the railroads. With their five-year plan … the railroad station was supposed to be for a city of 1 million.

Parsons: And Fort Worth had about 150,000 people at that time. That wasn’t ridiculous to them; they thought, “oh yeah, in a few years it’s going to be a million people” because that’s the way it looked. My favorite building is one in Tyler, the Peoples National Bank Building, which was designed by Alfred Finn of Houston. It’s a 1932 skyscraper in Tyler, which nobody believes exists. It’s, like, 16 floors. The story was that Tyler wasn’t in the oilfields, but it was where a lot of professionals lived because it was an established city and it had nice neighborhoods and it had schools and paved streets and all of that. The geologists and lawyers and landmen would live in Tyler, and they built this building for their professional offices. It’s surprising it’s in Tyler, and it’s a surprisingly sophisticated building for anywhere in Texas in 1932.

Q: Your “Fair Park” book published in 2012, but you of course devoted a chunk of space in this book to the site of the 1936 Centennial Exposition. That park is a real showcase for Art Deco style, isn’t it?

Bush: Oh, yes, and it all went up in nine months.

Parsons: They called it a world’s fair — technically, it wasn’t — but it’s the only Art Deco fairgrounds that still exists anywhere. A big percent of the 1936 stuff is still there. The New York world’s fair from 1939 is gone. Chicago’s from 1933 is gone. San Francisco’s is gone. If you want to get a sense of what it was really like, Dallas is the only place you can go. It’s come back around as a thing that they’re now proud of. And Fort Worth is proud of its architecture. It’s nice to see that they’re caring about it. For a long time they really didn’t. Nobody cared about it.