Morris Lapidus (Odessa, Russia, November 25, 1902. - Miami Beach, Florida, Jan. 18, 2001) was the architect of flamboyant neo-Baroque moderne hotels that defined the 1950s 'Miami Beach' resort hotel style. His first grand hotel was the Fountainbleau ('Fountain Blue') in 1953, followed the next year by the equally successful Eden Roc and the Americana (now the Sheraton Bal Harbour) in 1956. His many smaller projects give Miami Beach's Collins Avenue its style, anticipating post-modernism. The amoeba shapes that he called 'woggles' and 'painter's palette' cutouts, floating ceilings and stairs, and theatrical lighting characterize his ebullient work. In the era before central air conditioning, his curving walls caught the prevailing ocean breezes.
His family, Orthodox Jews, fled Russian pogroms to New York when he was an infant. As a young man, Lapidus toyed with theatrical set design and studied architecture at Columbia University. He worked for 20 years as a retail designer before moving to Miami Beach in the 1940s and designing his first buildings.
His first success was the Fountainbleau, built, significantly for the future, on the site of the Harvey Firestone estate and defining the new Gold Coast of Miami Beach. The hotel provided locations for the James Bond thriller Goldfinger (1964). Its most famous feature is the 'Staircase to Nowhere' that merely led to a coat check but offered the opportunity to make a glittering descent into the lobby.
- "My whole success is I've always been designing for people, first because I wanted to sell them merchandise. Then when I got into hotels, I had to rethink, what am I selling now? You're selling a good time."
Lapidus designed 1,200 buildings, including 250 hotels worldwide. The architectual establishment, wedded to doctrinaire expressions of International Modernism, scorned his work. A 1970 Architectural League exhibit in New York began the serious appraisal of his work. Lapidus was not unfazed by the critical panning; he burnt 50 years' worth of his drawings when he retired in 1984. But he rebounded in the post-modernist era: his autobiography Too Much is Not Enough, 1996, takes a shot at modernist guru Louis Kahn's dictum 'Less is more.'
Lapidus' wife of 63 years, Beatrice, died in 1992.
