Morris Lapidus

Morris Lapidus, architect of make-believe, died on January 18th 2001, aged 98

When the Fontainebleau was opened in Miami, its architect, Morris Lapidus, proudly spoke of it as “the world’s most pretentious hotel”. Pretentious? He quickly corrected the slip of the tongue: “flamboyant” was what he meant, of course. Yet a lexicographer might note that in its original Anglo-French meaning, of make-believe, pretentious was the precise word to describe Mr Lapidus’s style. He wanted the mostly ordinary holidaymakers who stepped into his hotels to feel that they were entering a wonderland. “I wanted people to walk in and drop dead,” he said. “I wanted them to say, ‘My God, this is luxury.’” Until Mr Lapidus built the Fontainebleau and other baroque hotels in Miami Beach in the 1950s, “luxury” had implied a quiet understatement.

If the hotel were modern it would tend to reflect the minimalist movement in architecture. To Mies van der Rohe’s dictum, “less is more”, Morris Lapidus responded, “Too much is never enough”, which became the title of his autobiography. He believed in the virtues of vulgarity: lots of colour, lots of curves, lots of surprises. He put live alligators in a pool in the lobby of one hotel, so that guests would “know they were in Florida”. He thought about having monkeys swinging from trapezes, but decided they might damage the chandeliers. There were jokes, some of them witty: replicas of classical statues playing golf, or using the phone. Laughter is a background noise in a Lapidus foyer. He saw his hotels as theatres with the guests taking on roles as actors. You could pretend to be famous. Some guests were. Some scenes in the James Bond movie Goldfinger were filmed in the Fontainebleau.

Extravagance is now so commonplace that Mr Lapidus’s wild designs may no longer seem extreme. But they predated the Disney theme parks and the follies of Las Vegas. The guests at his hotels had seen such glamour only in films; and, like the old movie palaces, with their deep carpets and plastic finery, they provided a brief escape from the humdrum realities of everyday life. Showy Miami, best viewed through rhinestone sunglasses, was right for him. Others soon played his tune. Go there now and even the motels, with such names as Tangiers and Suez, seem exotic.

Morris Lapidus’s hotels were loved by, or at least charmed, almost everyone except writers on architecture, who saw them as a blasphemous assault on the holy writ of austere functionality. “Pornography of architecture,” was one of the milder comments. Mr Lapidus said that during much of his long career his work was never published in an architectural journal, except to abuse it. “I was anathema,” he said. No one, though, doubted his acumen. He had a resemblance to another memorable American character, Sam Goldwyn, whose solecisms (“Never make predictions, especially about the future”) concealed a brilliant Hollywood film-maker. Both men were born in eastern Europe, Goldwyn in Poland, Lapidus in Russia.

Growing up in Brooklyn, the big treat for Morris was a trip to Coney Island. What he called the “whirling, twisting, colourful” lights were to reappear in Miami Beach. But contracts to design hotels do not come to young architects just out of college. Mr Lapidus spent some 20 years designing shops, small and big, attracting customers by using colour, light and “sweeping, curving” interiors. In the Fontainebleau, the first of several hundred hotels he designed, he incorporated “all the things I had learned from my store work. When I got into hotels, I had to think, what am I selling now? I was selling a good time.”

Mr Lapidus was sometimes asked who were his own favourite architects. He would surprise questioners by mentioning Frank Lloyd Wright, an American traditionalist, and Le Corbusier, a Swiss-born architect famous for his massive box-like blocks of flats. But Mr Lapidus admired workmanship, whatever the architectural genre, just as a fashion designer such as John Galliano is praised for his painstaking craftsmanship however you view his crazy clothes. Mr Lapidus was a craftsman. One contribution he made to architecture that hotel users are grateful for is the short corridor. He recalled that when he was a young architect travelling a lot from town to town, at the end of a weary day he always seemed to have a long walk to find his hotel room. The hotels he designed are shaped to end those long walks.

In 1990, when Morris Lapidus was 88 and thinking of retiring, and a bit depressed that his life’s work had gone unnoticed, he was suddenly discovered in Europe. His work, a critic noted, expressed the spirit of Main Street America. A Swiss publisher produced a tome entitled

Morris Lapidus: The Architect of the American Dream. Mr Lapidus was invited to the Netherlands for an exhibition about his work. American critics swallowed their pride and conceded that he had indeed had an influence. Last year he was named an “American original” at a ceremony at the White House in Washington. Some architects, Mr Lapidus noted, were starting to round the corners of their buildings. It was all quite pretentious, in a make-believe sort of way.