KOLKATA: Even as the world celebrates the centenary year of Art Deco, a distinct style of architecture that incorporated geometric patterns, sleek lines, zigzags, and sunbursts in buildings, conservation architects and heritage experts in Kolkata called for preservation and adaptive reuse of the city’s rich Art Deco built heritage, much like Miami did in the US.The spotlight on Kolkata’s Art Deco buildings, an often overlooked aspect of the city’s rich architectural heritage, followed a presentation by Art Deco researcher Adhiraj Bose and the Calcutta Heritage Collective (CHC), organised by the Chicago Art Deco Society (CADS).
With over 400 Art Deco buildings still standing across Kolkata, the city’s collection includes commercial façades, residential blocks, neighbourhood streets with repeating Deco details, and structures such as offices, cinemas, apartments, and private homes. Interestingly, the Art Deco style of architecture was adopted in Kolkata along the same time it was evolving in Euope and America. “The city’s inventory has the potential to rank among the most significant Art Deco collections in India and to be recognised globally,” said Bose.
Kolkata’s Art Deco buildings, created between the mid-1920s and mid-1950s, captured a decisive moment when the city negotiated modernity amid dramatic economic and social change. Emerging during a period of affluence and continuing through years marked by hardship, these structures recorded shifting aspirations: confidence in new technologies, new lifestyles, and a cosmopolitan identity, even as the city faced turbulence.“This was a period of great affluence followed by great poverty. It’s an important story that needs to be more widely known,” said CADS board President Joseph Loundy.
CHC founder Mukul Agarwal pointed out that the value of Kolkata’s Art Deco buildings lay not only in their visual appeal but in what they revealed about the city’s urban history and the people who commissioned, designed, built, and inhabited them.
Culturally, the buildings reflected Kolkata’s engagement with international design currents while expressing local tastes and social ambitions. Art Deco signalled progress through new materials, new construction methods, and a forward-looking aesthetic that contrasted with earlier colonial classicism, and it intersected with changing patterns of leisure and consumption in entertainment and retail, where lighting, signage, and façade composition projected glamour and novelty.
While the centenary year of the architectural style offers Kolkata an opportunity to present its Art Deco not only as heritage but as a cultural asset with international pull, Agarwal pointed out that Kolkata’s Art Deco buildings offered a deeper, layered urban narrative where Deco sat alongside colonial, indigenous, and modern histories, creating a destination for architecture lovers, photographers, researchers, and cultural travellers.
“If Miami Beach City makes tourists flock and the economy boosts, Kolkata’s Art Deco treasure can do the same too. Art Deco can be a game changer in the heritage map of India,” she added.Architectural features associated with Kolkata’s Art Deco:
- Strong horizontal lines; curved corners; stepped profiles; geometric ornament, sunbursts, chevrons, fluting, stylised floral motifs, and bold parapets.
- Buildings adapted global Art Deco vocabulary to local conditions through verandahs, recessed windows, ventilation features, and practical planning, responding to heat, monsoon, and dense streetscapes.
