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Tour of Miami Beach's Fontainebleau Hotel

Bob Vila visits Miami Beach's Fontainebleau Hotel, an architectural gem that symbolizes Miami. This curving white hotel, designed and built in 1954 by architect Morris Lapidus, is now a Hilton Resort near Miami's Art Deco District. As an architect, Lapidus flew in the face of conventional architecture, using curves instead of straight lines and avoiding corners in his designs. His grand spaces and stairways were reminiscent of French Chateaux. Lapidus' fanciful design was panned and ridiculed, but it still stands as a testament to the excesses of Miami Beach in the Post World War II era.
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Tour of Miami Beach's Fontainebleau Hotel

  computer-generated transcript - may not be 100% accurate

" The Fontainebleau hotel as -- the most spectacular property in all of Miami Beach dating back to 1950 or 55. No tour of the beach would be complete without taking a close look at it it's got a very interest in history in that if you look at what was happening here socially -- at as -- magnet for people from all over the east coast. Miami Beach was having a renaissance after World War II and a guy anymore a slap finesse who was you know that the son of Russian immigrants -- the New York. Came down here he was an architect he had had much success down. In the east Coast -- designing storefronts and interiors for department stores and here he really exploded with incredible ideas for the kind of architecture that really made Miami Beach stand out as a resort. He really loved curves. On. Women and on architecture so that anywhere you went in his buildings were apt to find strange interesting shapes. Wobbles he called them he just avoided corners everywhere he went but more than that he went all over Europe buying milk a million dollars worth of French antiques because the developer of the hotel had told him he wanted to be French country he didn't really know what French country was anyway what you've got here is kind of a monument to. The design excesses some would -- of the 1950s. In Miami Beach. The grand lobby spaces were really meant to evoke. Ballrooms in French -- to those of the detailing everywhere. Is extremely luxurious and this signature staircase to nowhere was really created so that the ladies had an opportunity to show off their gowns while Morris lapidus was busy putting things up like this wall of Swiss cheese imagine the concrete full of circles and glazed like this. To kind of perpetuate this whole. Feeling up. Finally if you will and being on vacation the serious architectural community was really getting angry at this is the time in American life and in the world where everybody was very interested in. I've modernism Bauhaus origins but you know -- cubes that sort of thing plain square simple and here's this man going like this everywhere the architectural community really panned him."

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