Tom's Life Bits

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===== Sans Souci =====
Writeup from MiamiBeach 411 blog\\
RIU FLORIDA BEACH HOTEL -\\

This hotel is located on Collins at 31st St. I stayed here as a
  young kid in 1970s when it was called the "Sans Souci" hotel.
  This was architect Morris Lapidus' first MiMo era hotel, built
  in 1949-1950, a few years before his famous Fontainebleau or
  Eden Roc hotels. The "Sans Souci" hotel building is still there
  today, but is called the Riu, but the outdoor pool area and
  grounds have been redesigned from what I could tell when
  recently walking the property. I have not stayed here in many
  years, so cannot review the rooms, but many reviews say the
  rooms are in need of refurbishment. This hotel would be a long
  walk to the South Beach area.\\
  
{{:info:pics:rc21373.jpg?450|}}  \\
Sans Souci at night\\
{{:info:pics:riu-florida-beach.jpg?450|San Souci}}\\
Sans Souci\\
3101 Collins\\
{{:info:pics:riu-07.jpg?450|}}\\
Sans Souci\\
{{:info:pics:riu-exterior.jpg?450|}}\\
Sans Souci exterior\\
{{:info:pics:800px-eden_roc_interior_fl1.jpg?450|}}\\
Eden Roc Interior\\
{{:info:pics:fontainebleau_hotel_1955_loc_gsc.5a23477u.jpg?450|}}\\
Fontainebleau hotel 1955\\

==== Morris Lapidus (November 25, 1902 – January 18, 2001) ====
 
Morris Lapidus 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 Russian immigrant based in New York, he
designed over 1000 buildings during a career spanning more than
50 years, much of it spent as an outsider to the American
architectural establishment.\\

**Early life and career**\\

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 toyed with theatrical set design
and studied architecture at Columbia University, graduating in
1927.[1] Lapidus worked for the prominent Beaux Arts firm of
Warren and Wetmore. He then worked independently for 20 years as
a retail architect before being approached to design vacation
hotels on Miami Beach.\\

Eden Roc Miami Beach Hotel, interior After a career in retail
interior design, his first large commission was the Miami Beach
Sans Souci Hotel (opened 1949, after 1996 called the RIU Florida
Beach Hotel), followed closely by the Nautilus, the Di Lido, the
Biltmore Terrace, and the Algiers, all along Collins Avenue, and
amounting to the single-handed redesign of an entire district.
The hotels were an immediate popular success.\\

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.[2] It was followed the next year by
the equally successful Eden Roc Hotel and the Americana (later
the Sheraton Bal Harbour) in 1956. The Sheraton was demolished
by implosion shortly after dawn on Sunday, November 18, 2007.\\

In 1955, Lapidus created 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 four young teenagers, who came to be known as the "St.
Augustine Four" were arrested at the same place and spent the
next six months in jail and reform school, until national
protests forced their release by the governor and cabinet of
Florida in January 1964. Martin Luther King hailed them as "my
warriors." The Woolworth's door-handles remain as a reminder of
the event, and a Freedom Trail marker has been placed on the
building by ACCORD, in its efforts to preserve the historic
sites of the civil rights movement.\\

The Lapidus style is idiosyncratic and immediately recognizable
in photographs, derived as it was from the attention-getting
techniques of commercial store design: sweeping curves,
theatrically backlit floating ceilings, 'beanpoles', and the
ameboid shapes that he called 'woggles', 'cheeseholes', and
painter's palette shapes. His many smaller projects give Miami
Beach's Collins Avenue its style, 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 would curve his hallways to
avoid the effect.\\

The Fontainbleau was built on the site of the Harvey Firestone
estate and defined the new Gold Coast of Miami Beach. The hotel
provided locations for the 1960 Jerry Lewis film The Bellboy, a
success for both Lewis and Lapidus, and the James Bond thriller
Goldfinger (1964). Its most famous feature is the 'Staircase to
Nowhere' (formally called the "floating staircase"), which
merely led to a mezzanine-level coat check and ladies' powder-
room, but offered the opportunity to make a glittering descent
into the hotel 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."\\

During the period before his death, Lapidus' style came back 
into focus. It began with his designing upbeat restaurants on 
Miami Beach and the Lincoln Road Mall. Lapidus was also honored 
by the Society of Architectural Historians at a convention held 
at the Eden Roc hotel in 1998. In 2000, the Smithsonian's 
Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum honored Lapidus as an 
American Original for his lifetime of work. Lapidus was quoted 
saying, "I never thought I would live to see the day when, 
suddenly, magazines are writing about me, newspapers are writing 
about me."\\

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