A burst of creative energy in the fields of architecture, design, and fashion characterized the years between the two World Wars. Shaping new styles of buildings and furnishings, redefining contemporary dress, and giving visual form to avant-garde performing arts, architects and designers forged a still-influential modern aesthetic. The era's most creative figures rarely worked in isolation, preferring instead to participate in international dialogues that crossed national boundaries and linked capital cities in collaborative artistic enterprise.
No two cities engaged in a more fertile conversation than Paris and New York. The interchange between them was never simple, however, comprising in equal measure admiration and envy, respect and rivalry, as artists and designers in each city interpreted and incorporated principles of Art Deco, Cubism, the International Style, Neo-Romanticism, and Surrealism into their own practices.

Donald Albrecht is the curator of architecture and design at the Museum of the City of New York. As an independent curator, he prepared the first retrospective of the work of Eero Saarinen and the international traveling exhibition "The Work of Charles and Ray Eames," organized by the Library of Congress and the Vitra Design Museum. He lives in New York.

Preface
Susan Henshaw Jones
Introduction
Donald Albrecht
Metropolis in the Mirror: Planning Regional New York and Paris
Jean-Louis Cohen
Modernity and Tradition in Beaux-Arts New York
Richard Guy Wilson
Beyond Metaphor: Skyscrapers Through Parisian Eyes
Isabelle Gournay
Africa on the Spiral: Jazz in New York and Paris Between the Wars
Jody Blake
Fashion Showdown: New York Versus Paris 1914?1941
Phyllis Magidson
The Longest Gangplank
Liora J. Cobin
New York Haute Cuisine
Amy Azzarito
Art Deco to American Modern at the 1929 Metropolitan Museum of Art Industrial Arts Exhibition
Marilyn F. Friedman
From Deco to Streamlined: Donald Deskey and Raymond Loewy
David A. Hanks
A Bridge to Postwar American Design: Gilbert Rohde and the 1937 Paris Exposition
Phyllis Ross
Neo-Romantics
Kenneth E. Silver