Writer — Editorial Associate at Atlantic Media’s @AMStrategy — #GWU alumnus — Work’s been in @FT, @MiamiHerald, and, of course, @gwhatchet

Feb 9, 2016

When Too Much is Never Enough

The Eden Roc hotel in Miami Beach designed by Morris Lapidus. Photo by the author.

Shortly after they slaughtered four members of the Clutter family late in 1959, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, his partner in crime, fled the scene of the murder to hide from police. Hickock made a break for somewhere remote, seedy, and morally insouciant — Miami Beach.

“Miles away, shrouded in a summery veil of heat-haze and sea-sparkle, he could see the towers of the pale, expensive hotels — the Fontainebleau, the Eden Roc, the Roney Plaza,” wrote Truman Capote in his account of the crime, In Cold Blood.

At the Fontainebleau hotel, completed five years earlier, Hickock and Perry are confronted by the high drama and opulence that came to color — in shimmering golds, azure blues, and pastels — Miami Beach of the 1950s and ’60s. On the hotel pool deck they see a “gambler or lawyer or maybe a gangster from Chicago.” A “blonde who resembled Marilyn Monroe was kneading him with suntan oil, and his lazy, beringed hand reached for a tumbler of iced orange juice.”

Frank Sinatra and Jill St. John at the Fontainebleau in a still from the 1967 movie “Tony Rome.”

If these images typify the then-magic of Miami Beach — where convict, debtor, or murderer could shed a disreputable past — then Morris Lapidus was the magician.

Lapidus, a Columbia-trained architect from Odessa, designed both the Fontainebleau and Eden Roc with his characteristic bent toward louche sumptuousness and dazzling excess. And although he was long derided by the architectural establishment, which favored the formal austerity of Bauhaus modernism, Lapidus remained undeterred in creating spaces that privileged fantasy over reality, play over work, vice over virtue.

“If you like ice cream, why stop at one scoop? Have two, have three. Too much is never enough,” Lapidus once said.

The magical lobby of the Eden Roc hotel, designed by Morris Lapidus. Photo by the author.

The bar area at the Fontainebleau. Photo by the author.

A detail of a marble column at the Fontainebleau. Photo by the author.

The Seagram Building in New York City designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a titan of Bauhaus modernism. Mies represented the philosophical and aesthetic opposite of Lapidus and came to define the architectural standard of his day.

Lapidus’ architectural vision represents an open-minded populism that grants anybody the power to transform into somebody extravagant. “Make the stage, and the people will play their part,” Lapidus said. He worked to recreate the magic of previous eras, borrowing extensively from the Baroque and Rococo vocabularies, while imbuing his work with forward-thinking optimism, futuristic splendor, and, most of all, a sense of unapologetic and unbridled joy.

A mid-18th century Rococo room. Rococo and Baroque served as important inspirations to Lapidus.

Lapidus died 15 years ago last month, at age 98, and while the architectural pendulum on Miami Beach has swung back to the clean lines, open spaces, and formal rigidity of high modernism, one can’t help appreciate the whimsical rebellion of Lapidus’ design philosophy—one that grants the visitor an escape, the power to assume a new identity, and a stage on which to dream.