Morris Lapidus

Morris Lapidus (November 25, 1902 – January 18, 2001) was an architect, primarily known for his Neo-baroque "Miami Modern" hotels constructed in the 1950s and 60s, which have since come to define that era's resort-hotel style, synonymous with Miami and Miami Beach.

A Jewish Ukrainian immigrant based in New York, Lapidus designed over 1,000 buildings during a career spanning more than 50 years, much of it spent as an outsider to the American architectural establishment.

Born in Odessa in the Russian Empire (now Ukraine), his Orthodox Jewish family fled Russian pogroms to New York when he was an infant. As a young man, Lapidus explored acting which led to his interest in theatrical set design where he was directed by scene painters to study architecture. He attended Columbia University, graduating in 1927. Lapidus worked for the prominent Beaux Arts firm of Warren and Wetmore. At that time his first project was to design a garage ornament for the Vanderbilt mansion. His design incorporated Mercury, the god of Speed, into a modern sculpture. Lapidus explained that the proposed "horse head and wagon was an anachronism." From 1929 to 1943 he worked with Ross-Frankel as a retail architect. When in early 1942 his father's company, U.S. Metals, employed Morris to design a Signaling Search Light, which had been commissioned by Admiral Rickover, he resigned from Ross-Frankel, but not before showing Evan Frankel the potato fields of The Hamptons, where they went to successfully field test the light.

After this very successful 22-year career in retail interior design with Ross-Frankel, Lapidus was asked to be a "hotel doctor" on several Miami Hotels. He soon was the associate architect of five hotel projects in Miami Beach—Sans Souci Hotel 1947 (opened 1949, after 1996 called the RIU Florida Beach Hotel), followed closely by the Nautilus 1950, the diLido (1951), the Biltmore Terrace (1951), and the Algiers (1951), all along Collins Avenue, and amounting to the single-handed redesign of an entire district. The hotels were an immediate popular success and Lapidus began to push the boundaries of the hotel experience further.

Then in 1952 he landed the job of the largest luxury hotel in Miami Beach, the property he is most associated with, the Fontainebleau Hotel, which was a 1,200 room hotel built by Ben Novack on the former Firestone estate, and perhaps the most famous hotel in the world. It was followed the next year by the equally successful Eden Roc Hotel, (where Harry Belafonte broke the "color-line" at the Beach by staying the night there), and the Americana (later the Sheraton Bal Harbour) in 1956. The Sheraton was demolished by implosion shortly after dawn on Sunday, November 18, 2007 and is now a W Hotel The St. Regis at Bal Harbor. Using these hotels as his "laboratory for design" and exploring "how to sell a good time" Lapidus became famous for his Miami Beach hotels: the Fontainebleau (1954), the Eden Roc (1955), and the Americana (the Bal Harbor Sheraton) (1956). The opening of the Fontainebleau was shown on TV. American's watched as dancing people in ballroom upon ballroom streamed into their living rooms. In effect, Lapidus had out-palaced the palace and the modern era of the Miami Beach and her resort hotels began: everyone had to go.

In 1955, Lapidus designed the Ponce de Leon Shopping Center near the plaza in St. Augustine, Florida. The anchor store, Woolworth's, was the scene of the first sit-in by black demonstrators from Florida Memorial College in March, 1960, and in 1963 by four young teenagers, who came to be known as the "St. Augustine Four." The Woolworth's door-handles and a Freedom Trail marker memorialize the events.

Lapidus later worked with Igor Polevitsky on the addition to the Shellborne Hotel where as with earlier hotels, of the big eight. At all early hotels he gave Miami Beach's Collins Avenue its architectural style and made interesting nightscapes with his neon lettering; excelling with the Venetian lettering for "diLido", the curving "S" at the Shellborne, or in the "ER" on the top rock at the Eden Roc. In the hotel interiors he anticipated post-modernism while serving up postcard views through modern glazing and decidedly modern exteriors. Lapidus's modern tropical style, continued in the housing projects which he completed all the way up the coast on Collins Avenue from 44th to 94th; the Seacoast East and West and the condominiums at Haulover Beach mark sensuous bookends to the incredible sinuous ride on Florida's Millionaire Row on the Atlantic Ocean.

The Lapidus style is idiosyncratic and immediately recognizable in photographs, derived as it was from his innovative and well-considered attention-getting techniques in his commercial store designs: sweeping curves, theatrically backlit floating ceilings, 'beanpoles', and the ameboid shapes that he called 'woggles', 'cheeseholes', as well his adept use of color, signage, lights, mirrors, techniques to "float columns", float stairs and move people along meandering lines—as people do not walk in a straight line—are the vocabulary of his design style. His many smaller projects give Miami Beach's Collins Avenue its style, including the interesting lettering styles in neon at the "diLido" and the Shellborne anticipating post-modernism. Beyond visual style, there is some degree of functionalism at work. His curving walls caught the prevailing ocean breezes in the era before central air-conditioning, and the sequence of his interior spaces was the result of careful attention to user experience: Lapidis heard complaints of endless featureless hotel corridors and when possible curved his hallways to avoid that effect.