Fontainebleau Miami Beach, Miami: architect, style and history

The Fontainebleau Miami Beach is a luxury hotel on Collins Avenue that opened in 1954, built by hotelier Ben Novack on the grounds of the former Harvey Firestone estate and designed by Morris Lapidus, who ran the hotel until its 1977 bankruptcy. The building's reputation has only grown since: the American Institute of Architects ranked it 93rd on its 2007 list of America's Favorite Architecture, and in 2012 the AIA's Florida Chapter named it the single best building in the state's first hundred years. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is today owned by the Soffer family's Fontainebleau Resorts.

the building

Lapidus's bow tie. Morris Lapidus was known for wearing bow ties, and he worked the shape into the Fontainebleau's design as a personal signature, a small joke embedded in a building that otherwise takes itself very seriously as the era's grandest Miami Beach hotel.

The Eden Roc lawsuit. The Fontainebleau is the namesake defendant in Fontainebleau Hotel Corp. v. Forty-Five Twenty-Five, Inc., a 1959 Florida appeals case in which the hotel successfully fought off an injunction sought by its neighbor, the Eden Roc Hotel, over construction on the property — a decision still cited in property law.

Firestone estate site. Novack built the hotel on land that had been the private estate of tire magnate Harvey Firestone, replacing a low-rise winter retreat with one of the largest and most theatrical hotels ever built on Collins Avenue.

the style

The Fontainebleau is one of the defining examples of the International Style applied to a Miami Beach resort hotel, built at a scale and with a theatrical flourish — right down to Lapidus's own bow-tie motif — that helped define the glamorous postwar look of Collins Avenue.

the architect

Morris Lapidus designed the Fontainebleau for hotelier Ben Novack, and the commission became one of the defining works of his career — the hotel that established him as Miami Beach's foremost hotel architect of the 1950s.

significance

The Fontainebleau is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 2007 the AIA ranked it 93rd nationally on 'America's Favorite Architecture,' and in 2012 the AIA's Florida Chapter placed it first on its list of the state's best buildings from its first hundred years.

nearby

Sorrento Hotel 0.1 mi · Mid-Century Modern · 1948
Eden Roc Miami Beach 0.1 mi · Mid-Century Modern · 1956
Barcelona Hotel 0.2 mi · Mid-Century Modern · 1957
The Montmartre Hotel 0.2 mi · Mid-Century Modern · 1958
Empress Hotel 0.2 mi · Mid-Century Modern · 1952
Braznell Apartments 0.2 mi · Mediterranean Vernacular · 1925

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