Donald Deskey; Art Deco Designer

Donald Deskey, one of the last if not the last of the Art Deco designers of the 1930s and beyond, has died at age 94 in Vero Beach, Fla., where he had lived since retiring in 1975.

The designer of packaging for the Procter & Gamble Co. (Crest, Aqua Velva, Cheer, Oxydol, Prell, et al.) and innovator whose streamlined interior of Radio City Music Hall in New York has become a national landmark, died Saturday of pneumonia, the New York Times reported.

With Raymond Loewy, Norman Bel Geddes and others Deskey gave America a new look with their innovative uses of common industrial materials, such as corrugated metal in showrooms and prefabricated homes.

His clients included not only commercial giants but millionaires--Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Adam Gimbel, Helena Rubenstein--whose homes featured the lush paneling and unusual lighting that were his trademark. He and his contemporaries made full use of the technology of the time, incorporating laminated plastic and tubular steel in their work.

Born in New York, Deskey came to Los Angeles in 1912 where he helped build theaters and designed roads. He went to San Francisco and then to Berkeley where he studied architecture at UC Berkeley. Eventually he made his headquarters in New York.

His work was shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1987 as part of “The Machine Age” exhibition.