The Art Deco style was at the height of its popularity for buildings in 1931. Its clean simple lines and base relief decoration suited the needs of the new city...

• Art Deco was fashionable. With its past destroyed, Napier looked ahead and chose a style associated with Manhattan, the movies and modernism.
• Art Deco was safe. With its emphasis on low relief surface decoration, Art Deco forsook the elaborate applied ornament that had fallen from the buildings in the Earthquake and caused so m any deaths and injuries.
• Art Deco was cheap. Its relief stucco ornament was an economical way to beautify buildings during the lowpoint of the Great Depression.

Other architectural styles for the period were also used - the Spanish Mission style from California, and both Stripped Classical and Classical Moderne, the styles of Greece and Rome but simplified and modernized. And local architect Louis Hay's work strongly reflects Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie Style inthe United States mid-west, which developed in the early years of the century.