TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

Some twenty years later, the architect John Eberson, the best known of those architects developing the architectural style known as “atmospheric,” became very popular. Towards the late 1920s, he designed and decorated numerous “movie palace”-type theatres, in which the ceiling and walls framing the screen were decorated with thematic motifs intended to “transport” the viewer to another geographical place or to another time. Vast starry skies on the ceiling, for example, created a canopy effect in the form of a dome, with oriental ornamentation on the walls or sumptuous exotic garden arrangements around the screen and stage.^[3]