The public architecture of the New Deal does not have a single name (Art Deco, WPA Moderne, and Stripped Classicism are merely some of the stylistic terms used to describe it), but it does have a unified aesthetic sensibility. That ethos is quite different from both the postwar modernism that followed it and the neoclassical Beaux Arts style that preceded it.
From a contemporary point of view, which thinks of modernism and classicism as two separate and opposite things, New Deal architecture seems like a hybrid. From classicism it borrows symmetrical compositions, colonnades, a sense of weight and mass, and the use of stone. From modernism it takes a sober approach to ornamentation, using it only for special emphasis, and also compositions that convey movement rather than balance—often, though not always, vertical movement, as in famous Art Deco skyscrapers like the Chrysler Building.
In mood, however, New Deal architecture is not hybrid at all. What it conveys is quite specific: grandeur, beauty, dynamism, and power—sometimes playfully and sometimes soberly.
A number of New Deal buildings are icons. The Griffith Observatory, constructed by the Works Progress Administration in 1933-35, has featured in countless movies not solely because of its privileged location on a promontory overlooking the Los Angeles basin but because its architectural composition synthesizes classical, romantic, and modern forms into an expression of optimism, pride, and energy. Its form connects the jumbled, energetic geometry of the hillside and the smooth, spherical world of the sky. It seems to surge up from its cliff edge into the empyrean.
This synthesis was suitable for a wide range of uses and levels of ambition. Down the hill from Griffith Park, in downtown Los Angeles, is the Spring Street Federal Courthouse, finished in 1940. The romantic aspects of the observatory are absent, replaced by a pure classical-modern synthesis. Its modernist austerity communicates a certain sobriety and dignity, which is enhanced by its classical symmetry, proportions, and grand entrance colonnade. It suggests that justice is a god who is at home in American courts.
It can go smaller, too. Across the whole country are simple post offices, courthouses, and city halls, scarcely more than one-room boxes, built during the Depression years, that nonetheless communicate a kind of public grandeur through the use of small articulations in the facade, evoking a colonnade of flat, engaged columns. These buildings are modest, but their dignity is quite real, and they present an elevated and unifying ideal of the public realm and American nationhood.