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--- info:pics:san_souci_hotel [2016/12/16 18:07] – created tomgle
+++ info:pics:san_souci_hotel [2016/12/16 19:12] (current) – tomgle
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   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.
+  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\\
+{{:info:pics:riu-07.jpg?450|}}\\
+Sans Souci\\
+{{:info:pics:riu-exterior.jpg?450|}}\\
+Sans Souci exterior\\
+Collins\\
+{{:info:pics:sans_souci.jpg?450|}}\\
+Sans Souci postcard\\
+{{: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
+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
+.[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."\\