Miami Beach

My image of Miami was already tainted, mostly by episodes of CSI Miami’s mythical paradise of material opulence: a world of private yachts, pristine condo towers and sculpted bodies barely clothed in designer fashion, all rendered in impossibly saturated colors. Given the series is filmed almost entirely in a Los Angeles studio, I was bound to be disappointed when finally encountering the real Miami on my recent southern vacation. Architecturally, I was interested in exploring three distinct yet overlapping moments in Miami’s history – the 1930s, the 1950s, and the 1980s – in my mind exemplified by South Beach Art Deco, Morris Lapidus, and Arquitectonica, respectively. The overlap relates to the image of Miami described above: an artificial space constructed like a stage set upon which tourists might comfortably escape their everyday lives.

Henry Hohauser, Studio Apartments, South Beach, 1930s

Robert Taylor, Beach Patrol Headquarters, South Beach, 1934

Miami has long been imagined in American popular consciousness as a utopian space of leisure. The city’s early development as a tourist destination in the 1920s reflected this – grand hotels and villas in a pseudo-Mediterranean style appealed to the northern wealthy elite as appropriate settings for the cosmopolitan pursuit of touristic pleasures. Even the landscape was transformed to reflect the image of a tropical paradise. Among other imported tropical vegetation, coconut palm trees, for example, were imported from Trinidad, and soon became inseparable from the image of Miami Beach as a tropical paradise. After the Depression, South Beach became increasingly established as a middle class tourist destination – Art Deco and streamline design dominated its modest hotels – and the Beach became known as America’s Winter Playground.

Roy F. France, The Cavalier Hotel, 1936

The Art Deco style of South Beach hotels appealed to middle class tourists as it signified modernity, upward mobility, and, not least, it was familiar to northerners. Three of the best-known Miami architects of the 1930s brought Art Deco ideas with them from northern cities: Lawrence Murray Dixon worked for Schultze & Weaver in New York (including work on the Waldorf Astoria) before settling in Miami in 1928; Henry Hohauser, a graduate of Pratt Institute, arrived in Miami from New York in 1932; and Albert Anis worked in Chicago in the 1920s. Along with several others, these three architects designed dozens of hotels and garden apartment complexes in Miami in the 1930s. Stripped of excessive ornament and historical references, their Deco hotels in South Beach were symmetrical, geometric, and machine-like. These miniature skyscrapers were characterized by stepped motifs in the central section, concrete sun shades or “eyebrows” above the windows, and, later in the 1930s, streamlined curves, speed lines and movie theater-style marquee signage.

Henry Hohauser, The Congress Hotel, 1930s: symmetrical facade with stepped central section, prominent eyebrows above the windows, and theater-style marquee signage.

Miami’s Deco architects were also intimately involved in designing the glamorous interiors of these hotels, including built-in furniture, lighting, carpets and terrazzo flooring patterns (see the interiors of the Winter Haven, below). Interior motifs were often nautical, reflecting the romance of ocean liners in their blend of high-tech, modern materials, such as terrazzo flooring, glass blocks, chrome finished railings and neon lighting. These seductive modern spaces suggested the cosmopolitan pleasures of travel yet were usually designed to a tight budget – the realities of the machine age meant that architects and interior designers could create luxurious looking surfaces and fittings that were mass produced.

Above: Albert Anis, Winter Haven Hotel, South Beach, Miami, 1939

Below: Three views of the lobby of the Winter Haven Hotel: the ocean liner-inspired staircase, terrazzo floor, and view towards the street. Below these is the glass block bar in the lobby of Lawrence Murray Dixon's hotel, The Victor, 1937.

While the first phase of South Beach Deco ended with World War Two, the second phase began with Deco’s revival in the 1980s. The famous Art Deco crusader Barbara Baer Capitman founded the Miami Design Preservation League in 1976, and through their efforts, an area of roughly a square mile and comprising an estimated 800 buildings was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. Remarkably, whole blocks of 20th century buildings were preserved – the South Beach streetscape has since become a kind of open air Art Deco museum. Miami’s Deco revival was spread by some high-profile cultural characters in the 1980s, including a tour by Andy Warhol, and public support for South Beach Deco from architects such as Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Philip Johnson. Television played a part too, with the popular series Miami Vice capturing both the lingering decadence of South Beach (which had fallen into disrepair and disrepute) as well as its new-found glamour, a contrast also picked up by fashion photographers who began using the area as a backdrop. Crucial to this 1980s Deco revival was the creation of the South Beach palette, the pastel colors of designer Leonard Horowitz brightened up the formerly white Deco hotels and apartments.

Albert Anis, The Leslie Hotel, South Beach, 1937

A postwar boom in Miami tourism and business saw the construction of ever larger high-rise hotels and apartments, including Morris Lapidus’ luxurious Fontainebleau (1953) and Eden Roc (1955) resorts – tourism began to shift from the small Deco hotels of South Beach to larger, all-inclusive resorts. I didn’t make it inside these remaining Lapidus hotels, which have been altered since the 1950s anyway, but I did spend some time on Lincoln Road. In 1959, Lapidus transformed six blocks of Lincoln Road into an open-air pedestrian mall, with designs that included shade structures, planters, fountains and patterned paving. His pitch to Lincoln Road traders included the memorable motto: “A car never bought anything.” While this was the “Fifth Avenue” of Miami in the 1950s, Lincoln Road isn’t lined with expensive boutiques these days: think Starbucks rather than Saks. But Lapidus’ interventions, since restored I believe, have stood the test of time – curious, eccentric structures that blur the boundary between architecture, landscape design, and public sculpture.

Above and below: Morris Lapidus' Lincoln Road pedestrian mall structures, 1959

Finally, I sought out Arquitectonica’s iconic Atlantis condominiums (1982), now in a row of similarly luxurious and exclusive condominiums on Brickell Avenue. It is difficult to get close to the Atlantis – like its neighbours, it is blocked by an entrance gate at the street – so seeing it really is a drive-by experience. The Atlantis (images below) was featured in the opening sequence of Miami Vice (and briefly in the film Scarface, which also prominently featured a South Beach apartment block in a drug deal-gone-bad scene early in the film). The Miami-based Arquitectonica, now a large firm working internationally, rose to prominence in the 1980s, and seemed to draw from the artificial, stage set aesthetic common to Deco and Lapidus. Though not designed for tourists, the Atlantis still embodies a sense of escapism, wit and playfulness, not to mention a particularly Miami version of glamour and luxury. The central cut-out “sky court” features a distinctive red staircase (an echo of Lapidus’ famous “staircase to nowhere” in the Fountainbleau?), yellow piping and the ubiquitous symbol of tropical paradise, a palm tree. As a tempting metaphor for Miami itself, consider the palm tree up there, framed in a void, far from the ground, kicking back by the pool.

All photographs by D. J. Huppatz. More South Beach Art Deco photographs on my Flickr page (access My Pics on column to the right).

Bibliography

Barbara Baer Capitman, Deco Delights: Preserving the Beauty and Joy of Miami Beach Architecture, New York, EP Dutton, 1988.

Jean-Francois LeJeune, ed., The Making of Miami Beach: 1933-1942: the Architecture of Lawrence Murray Dixon, New York, Rizzoli, 2000.

Morris Lapidus, Too Much is Never Enough, New York, Rizzoli, 1996.

William Lescaze: Modernism at what price today?

With all my Lescaze research over the last couple of months, I've only just registered that William Lescaze's house at 32 E74th St, aka the Kramer House, is currently for sale for $14 million (the NY Observer asked "Is it worth it?"). Similar to his own midtown townhouse, the Kramer House was built by Lescaze in 1934-35, for friends, Raymond and Mildred Kramer, and is approximately 6,800 square feet. This was the townhouse restored a few years ago by Laura Day. Some images and a plan of the townhouse below, but see also images of the original interiors here and here.

William Lescaze, Kramer House, plan

William Lescaze: Early Interiors

Continuing my research on the career of William Lescaze, I thought it worth returning to Lescaze’s New York projects of the late 1920s, which comprise almost entirely interiors. Lanmon notes that in 1928, Lescaze wrote to Le Corbusier complaining that all he ever got commissioned to design was interiors – restaurants, private apartments, retail interiors and exhibition rooms – and Corbu replied sympathetically: “That's the way it always is. I didn't do anything myself for years, besides writing articles and giving lectures. Keep it up.” (in Lanmon 1987: 37) But despite Lescaze’s frustration at not being commissioned to design complete modernist buildings, his early interiors contributed to the growing sense of modernity in 1920s America. Although I haven’t done exhaustive research here, I thought it was worth sharing these images and what little information I have found, as these projects are not widely known nor are the images readily available. All of these projects were completed before Lescaze’s partnership with George Howe and the well-known Philadelphia Savings Fund Society building (1929-32).


Above: Capital Bus Terminal, 239 West 50th St and 240-242 West 51st St, New York, 1927. I can find very little information on this building, although it does seem to reflect Lescaze’s knowledge of European modernism and seems fittingly designed for a relatively modern form of mass transportation.



Above: Display room for department store Frederick Loeser and Company, Fulton Street, Brooklyn, 1928. Includes Lescaze-designed furniture.



Above: Display room, penthouse studio apartment, Macy’s Department Store exhibition, “International Art in Industry”, 1928. This exhibition also included exhibition rooms by designers such as Josef Hoffmann, Gio Ponti and Kem Weber.



Above: Showroom, Andrew Geller Shoe Factory, Brooklyn, 1928.
Lescaze’s design here is austere and efficient, a retail space stripped back to essential display and furnishings. The color scheme was neutral and Lescaze here displayed his interest in recessed lighting. The Andrew Geller Shoe company was formed by Andrew Geller in 1910 and manufactured upscale shoes. Geller’s nephew, Bertram Geller began designing shoes for the company around the time of the Lescaze commission. Bertram Geller continued the family patronage of modern architecture by commissioning Marcel Breuer to design the influential Geller House, in 1945, and then another house, Geller House II (interior), between 1959 and 1969 (both in Lawrence, Long Island). Marcel Breuer and Associates later redesigned the Andrew Geller company offices and showroom in Manhattan in 1975 (see the Smithsonian Institute’s Breuer archive).



Above: Leopold Stokowski studio apartment, East 71st Street, 1929.

English-born conductor Leopold Stokowski moved to New York in 1905 to work as an organist and choir director. After further study in Paris, he returned to the US to work as a conductor in Cincinnati and became known as a passionate advocate for modern music by living composers. In 1912, Stokowski became conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra and his reputation for modern music expanded to include his flamboyant showmanship, which included conducting without a baton and altering the seating of the orchestra. As a committed modernist, he also maintained a life-long interest in modern concert hall acoustics and the latest technological advances in sound reproduction. In Philadelphia, Stokowski continued to premier and champion modern music, including that of modern composers such as Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitri Shostakovich and Igor Stravinsky.

Lescaze’s New York pied-à-terre for the composer was a studio apartment designed for mobile lifestyle and for a cosmopolitan modern individual – the open space, built-in furniture and flat surfaces stripped of ornament and all historical references cohere into a complete environment, a unity of form, color and space similar to what European modernists were doing in the 1920s. The emphasis on coziness, warmth, decorative and luxurious surfaces that was so popular with the New York bourgeoisie, is completely absent. Lescaze’s painterly abstraction and embrace of a new, universal aesthetic not only self-consciously reject tradition, but also pare back sensory distractions so the inhabitant might focus on higher thoughts. Stokowski’s studio apartment is an economic living space organized in rational manner, its built-in cabinetry, geometric carpet and austere furniture, all designed by Lescaze, suggest a holistic machine built for modern convenience. In this commission, Lescaze clearly understood the modernist ideal of the gesamtkunstwerk and in Stokowski, he presumably found a client with complementary modernist ideals.



Finally, Stokowski was responsible for getting Lescaze the commission to design a new building for the Oak Lane Country Day School in 1929 (sketch above and photos below). Stokowski was a parent at the school and provided funding for a new nursery wing designed by Lescaze. Oak Lane was a progressive school founded in 1916, and in 1924, the school counted philosopher and educational reformer John Dewey among its advisory board members. In the late 1920s, the school’s headmaster William Curry’s educational philosophy was based on modern progressive education principles: “firstly, an enhanced concern for individual children and their way of learning, secondly, the need for pupil participation in school governance, thirdly, a resistance to uninformed parents forcing their views of education upon teachers.” (Dudek 2000: 22) In 1931, Curry moved to Dartington Hall school in England, where he commissioned more Lescaze-designed educational buildings. In these last two examples, the Stokowski apartment and the Oak Lane school, Lescaze’s modernist design not only serves to self-consciously reject traditional design, values and hierarchies, but explicitly emphasizes individuality as the basis for a new modern society.




References

Dudek, Mark, Architecture of Schools: New Learning Environments, Oxford: Architectural Press, 2000.

Lanmon, Lorraine Welling, William Lescaze, Architect, Philadelphia: The Art Alliance Press, 1987.

Leopold Stokowski: Making Music Matter, an University of Pennsylvania Library Special Collection exhibition.

Whatever Happened to William Lescaze?

Of all the entries on this blog over the past three years, the one that has sparked the most interest in terms of emails and queries is this one on architect William Lescaze’s 1934 New York townhouse. Curiously, I have received a few emails over the past couple of years that have addressed me as some kind of expert on Lescaze’s work. While I am, in fact, far from an expert, a basic Google search suggests otherwise. Which not only proves that you shouldn’t believe all that Google says, but more importantly, that there is very little information about Lescaze available online. In fact, even written information on Lescaze’s work is mostly out of print and/or difficult to access (and available only in college libraries). So, in the public interest (and in an effort to maintain the illusion of my expert status), I thought I would add to my previous post and begin to compile more information about Lescaze. I have been especially inspired by the recent comment by Laura Day, a designer who bought Lescaze’s New York townhouse, the Kramer House (1935) in 2006 and revived it back to its original state. Beyond this brief introduction is an incomplete and ongoing bibliography, so please contact me with any additional material you may have or know of and I will add it to the listings below.

The first and perhaps most interesting question to address is: whatever happened to William Lescaze? Or more precisely, how is it that, in the 1930s, he was widely considered, along with Frank Lloyd Wright and Richard Neutra, as a leader of modernist architecture in the United States (see Lanmon 1987: 10), but today his work has been almost forgotten. After World War Two, it seems, his career and contribution to American modernism was overshadowed by Bauhaus émigrés and their students, and since his death in 1969 has drifted into such obscurity that today, the only monograph devoted to Lescaze’s work, Lorraine Welling Lanmon’s William Lescaze, Architect (Philadelphia: The Art Alliance Press, 1987), is out of print. Compared to the voluminous material on Wright and Neutra available both online and in print, the dearth of available Lescaze material confirms the idea that his career has indeed sunk into obscurity. Mention of Lescaze in general histories of American architecture now is restricted to Lescaze and Howe’s PSFS building in Philadelphia, often claimed to be the first International Style skyscraper in the US. Beyond that, there is precious little material around.

Reviewing his prewar career, it seems remarkable that Lescaze’s career has been so neglected. After all, Lescaze was the sole American at the 1928 CIAM conference in Switzerland, was one of only a handful of American architects included in MoMA’s influential International Style exhibition of 1932, and not only designed modernist buildings and industrial objects, but also wrote articles promoting modern architecture during a time when there was little support for modernism in the US.

William H. Jordy, in a 1984 article “William Lescaze Reconsidered”, (reprinted in ‘Symbolic Essence’ and Other Writings on Modern Architecture and American Culture) considered the highpoint of Lescaze’s career to be the PSFS building (1929-32), and includes the decade 1929-39 as his most interesting period, while Lescaze’s post-war work was described by Jordy as “dull”. Even in his prewar work, however, Jordy argued that Lescaze had “the pragmatic attitude of one who had absorbed the look of modernism more than its message” (Jordy 2005: 175) and adopted the visual effects of one “who receives a cosmopolitan style secondhand” (Jordy 2005: 179).

However, such a reading seems outrageous when one considers Lescaze’s biography, documented in Lanmon’s monograph: while studying with progressive architect Karl Moser at Zurich’s Eidgenössische Technische Hoschscule between 1915 and 1919, Lescaze knew of Dada firsthand, as well as Futurism, De Stijl, Constructivism and Le Corbusier’s work through publications. After graduation, Lescaze went to Paris to work (albeit briefly) for Henri Sauvage, a pioneer of prefabrication and devotee of modern ideas on collective housing. Even after emigrating to the US in 1920, Lescaze frequently travelled to Europe in the 1920s, particularly to Berlin, Paris (to visit the 1925 International Exposition and in 1927 specifically to visit Le Corbusier). It is safe to say that Lescaze had significant firsthand experience with the latest currents of European modernism. How is it then that he has come to be seen as a kind of pseudo-modernist?

My initial idea was that once the “real” modernists arrived from the US (particularly Gropius, Mies, and Breuer), earlier exponents of modernism were relegated into the background. Design historian Dennis Doordan replied to my query “Whatever Happened to William Lescaze” via email this week and confirmed this idea, suggesting that Lescaze lacked the academic credibility of the later émigrés. But he also added that Lescaze’s work was not supported by the influential MoMA (beyond the 1932 exhibition), and his small office could not compete for large commissions in the new postwar corporate climate. Although he continued working until the late 1960s, Lescaze’s postwar work remains completely obscure, and even Lanmon’s book has relatively little to say about his postwar career.

What seems to me at this stage to be significant about Lescaze’s career, beyond his PSFS tower and New York townhouses, are:

- his early modernist interiors of the 1920s (I'm still tracking down more images of these).

- other private houses of the 1930s, particularly the Field House (short article in DOCOMOMO, Summer 2006), the Loomis House (see images below), and the Roy Spreter Studio.

- a nursery building for the Oak Lane Country Day School, 1929, which, along with Neutra’s Corona Avenue School in California, was an early progressive educational building (see Weisser article below).

- his Dartington Hall buildings in the UK, 1932-35, also part of Lescaze’s contribution to modernist educational facilities.

- the Williamsburg Houses. Though these get mixed reviews, they do represent Lescaze’s dream of designing modern mass housing. Pommer (below) describes them as “the eclectic and confused reception of European modernist housing”.

- the postwar work, which may be worth another look.

- his writings, which I haven’t a lot of as yet.

- his teaching, which seems to include a brief stint at Pratt Institute, teaching industrial design, and also some kind of connection to Black Mountain.

Again, any help or ideas or comments you have out there, please let me know. I will update these lists as more information comes to hand.


William Lescaze's house for Alfred Loomis in Tuxedo Park, New York, 1937





Online information

Lescaze’s own New York townhouse at 211 East 48th Street (1933-34): New York Landmarks Preservation Commission Report (1976).

Lescaze’s Williamsburg Houses (1935-38): New York Landmarks Preservation Commission Report (2003).


Dawn of a New Age: the Immigrant Contribution to the Arts in America, a 2008-09 Syracuse University Library exhibition, featured a Lescaze section and a dozen images.

Lescaze page at MoMA (includes his Salt and Pepper shakers, model of the MoMA tower proposal, and a coat hook!).

An article on Lescaze in French, “William Lescaze, architecte, peintre et designer”, includes a brief interview with his niece.

Archive

The William Lescaze Papers at University of Syracuse. Biographical materials, lectures, photographs, drawings, correspondence and writings by and about Lescaze, as well as material related to Lescaze's one-time partner, George Howe.

Monograph

Lanmon, Lorraine Welling, William Lescaze, Architect, Philadelphia: The Art Alliance Press, 1987 (first publication by Rizzoli, 1982). The most authoritative account of Lescaze’s career to date. This was based on her 1979 doctoral dissertation at University of Delaware.

Writings by Lescaze

Lescaze, William, On Being an Architect, New York: Putnam's Sons, 1942. A rare publication, a copy of which I am yet to track down.

Lescaze also wrote many journal articles, particularly in the 1930s – you may be able to source these through university libraries and some are available as PDFs via the JSTOR database. Here are two major articles I’ve found so far:

Lescaze, William, “The Meaning of Modern Architecture”, The North American Review, Vol. 244, No. 1 (Autumn, 1937): 110-120. This is available via JSTOR but also unformatted here. This is a textbook manifesto of modernist architecture.

Lescaze, William, “A Modern Housing for a Museum”, Parnassus, Vol. 9, No. 6 (Nov. 1937): 12-14. An article that I think is based on Howe and Lescaze’s earlier proposal submitted for the proposed Museum of Modern Art (New York, a commission that went to Goodwin and Stone). An ambitious (visionary?) project comprising nine blocks of cubic exhibition spaces stacked at angles.

Journal

A special issue of the University of Syracuse journal Courier 19 (Spring 1984), edited by Dennis Doordan, featured a number of articles on Lescaze.

Book chapters and references

Wojtowicz, Robert, ed., Sidewalk Critic: Lewis Mumford’s Writings on New York, New York: Princeton University Press, 1998. Short section on Lescaze’s 1934 New York townhouse, written by Mumford not long after the building’s completion.

Jordy, William H., “William Lescaze Reconsidered”, in Jordy, William H., ‘Symbolic Essence’ and Other Writings on Modern Architecture and American Culture, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. This is a 1984 article by Jordy, based on his article in the University of Syracuse journal (above).

Articles

Albrecht, Donald, and Thomas Mellins, “Going Gershwin”, Interior Design, March 2007. A good article on Lescaze and Howe’s PSFS Building, focusing specifically on the interiors.

Brooks, H. Allen, “PSFS: A Source for Its Design”, The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (27: 4 Dec. 1968): 299-302.

Doordan, Dennis P., “Design at CBS,” Design Issues (6:2 Spring, 1990): 4–17. An excellent account of corporate design at CBS including Lescaze’s architecture and interiors of their broadcast facilities in Hollywood (1936-38).

Jordy, William H., “PSFS: Its Development and Its Significance in Modern Architecture”, The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (21: 2 May 1962): 47-83.

Pommer, Richard, “The Architecture of Urban Housing in the United States during the Early 1930s”, The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (37:4 Dec. 1978): 235-264. Generally critical of the Williamsburg Housing project, designed by Lescaze (and fellow Swiss émigré Albert Frey), Pommer argues that it was a mistranslation of European modernist housing ideas.

Stern, Robert A.M., “PSFS: Beaux-Arts Theory and Rational Expressionism”, The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (21: 2 May 1962): 84-102.

Weisser, Amy S., “The Little Red School House, What Now? Two Centuries of American Public School Architecture”, Journal of Planning History (5:3, 2006): 196-217.

Thesis

Alan Jon Warner, "Stylistic Influences on the Design of The Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building", Masters Thesis, Ohio State University, 1983.