As a Scorpio, Morris Lapidus was interested in the architecture of pleasure. His architecture channelled the dreams and desires of working-class immigrants who had worked their way up into middle-class affluence. Their new-found wealth enabled them to afford glamorous 1950s' cars and candle-lit dinners in nice restaurants and luxurious vacations in exotic tropical climates. Morris Lapidus began his career designing mundane retail stores, which he saw as a good way to earn a living.
He was fascinated by the shop facade, which he designed to function as a glamour lighting sign. Venturi acknowledged his use of signage as a principal feature of his architecture. Lapidus was sensitive to popular culture. As a Russian Jewish immigrant he identified with the dreams of Eastern Europeans, newly arrived in the materialist American land of plenty, channelling their aristocratic fantasies of Versailles and French châteaux. In fact his major Miami hotel is called the Fontainebleau.
Lapidus came out of the 1950s where Liberace's TV sets, which featured elaborate candelabras placed on a grand piano, were matched only by the Las Vegas stage costumes of Liberace's friend Elvis Presley. Lapidus manifested all the decadence of Hollywood film sets and the Las Vegas stage show in emotive, baroque architectural interiors. Lapidus even went as far as to embellish his columns, surrounding them with elliptical vitrines and glass display cabinets.
Like the commercial signs of Vegas, Lapidus's work features bright, colourful lighting and has the fluidity of water, very much a Miami Beach milieu. His beachfront hotels also used water in the biomorphic kidney-shaped forms of swimming pools placed in oversized, amusement-park-like terraces facing the ocean. These terraces use curving baroque forms and coloured stone surfaces, which relate his work to Burle Marx's "garden architecture/terraces" for Oscar Niemeyer. An architect like Rem Koolhaas (also a Scorpio) relates his work to Niemeyer and Harrison in the desire to move beyond the minimalism of De Stijl and implicit Calvinist tendencies towards more curvaceous forms. Similarities between Niemeyer and Lapidus lie in their hedonist tendencies and their longevity: Lapidus died at 98, and Niemeyer is now nearly 100. Both use organic forms within their architecture along with a tropical colour palette. Lapidus used long, flowing, ever-changing corridors, often connecting floors with large, open, aristocratic spiral staircases. He broke all the rules. He used coloured linoleum as the material for wall murals due to its glamorous patterns. The 1950s were typically a period of plastics, where the possibilities of this material replaced wood. He used curving glass brick walls as shop facades.
Seen as a commercial "developer" creating an ersatz "European" environment for naïve Americans, his work is now starting to be appreciated by a larger and more discerning younger generation.
One of the most influential conceptual artists of his time, Dan Graham currently lives in New York.
Jessica Russell studied and practiced art in Melbourne. She currently studies architecture at The Cooper Union in New York.