Tom's Life Bits

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.\\

Sans Souci at night

Sans Souci

Sans Souci

Sans Souci exterior
3101 Collins

Sans Souci postcard

Eden Roc Interior

Fontainebleau hotel 1955

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.”