THE FAMILY / Morris Lapidus

 

MORRIS LAPIDUS, born in 1902, is best known as the designer of glamorous postwar resort hotels in Florida, such as the Fontianebleau (1954) and the Eden Roc (1955) in Miami Beach. Yet in a remarkable sixty-year career that began in 1926, he designed more than 500 retail stores, hotels, apartment complexes, and stage sets that captured the popular spirit and changing face of Main Street America in the 20th century. His signature forms - chevrons, “beanpoles,” “woggles,” or amoeba shapes, and curving walls and ceilings punctuated by “cheese holes,” or cutouts - have become treasured icons of American postwar vernacular architecture. Lapidus has described his work as a banquet of delight and joy, once telling an interviewer, “If you like ice cream, why stop with one scoop; have three scoops, too much is never enough. Enjoy! Enjoy!”