Florida Architecture of Addison Mizner (Dover Architecture)
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An architect who excelled at transforming an architectu...)
An architect who excelled at transforming an architectural fantasy into a practical, livable home, Addison Mizner was one of the most original and influential designers America has produced. The houses, clubs, and shops he built for the wealthy of Palm Beach and Boca Raton, Florida, evince a brilliant grasp of how to blend a building with the environment, how to adapt it to the climate and how to situate it in order to make the best use of the elements of sea, light, and air.
This lavishly illustrated volume recaptures the genius of Addison Mizner. It contains over 180 photographs — both interiors and exteriors — depicting more than 30 residences, including Mizner's own, plus those of Harold Vanderbilt, Rudman Wanamaker, A. J. Drexel Biddle, Jr., Edward Shearson, Mrs. Hugh Dillman, and many more. Also covered are such landmark Mizner creations as the Everglades Club, Via Parigi, the Singer Building, The Cloister at Boca Raton, the Riverside Baptist Church at Jacksonville, and many others.
A superb appreciation by author and journalist Ida M. Tarbell offers fascinating glimpses into Mizner's early life and background, and how it prepared him to develop architecture that "belonged" in the Florida landscape. Inspired by the beauty and charm of the villas and palaces of the Mediterranean, Mizner designed in a Spanish Colonial style far better suited to the subtropical sun and climate of Florida than the transplanted houses of the North at first so common in the state. A new Introduction by Mizner scholar Donald W. Curl offers an additional appreciation of the architect and his innovative and imaginative conceptions, which continue to win new admirers among connoisseurs of classic design.
Reproduced from a rare edition much sought after by collectors, this inexpensive volume will be welcomed by architects, students and historians of architecture — and anyone interested in the life and achievements of Addison Mizner.
Addison Cairns Mizner was born on December 12, 1872, in Benicia, California. He was the sixth child of Lansing Bond and Ella (Watson) Mizner. He was a descendant of Lawrence Mizner, who emigrated to America in 1700 and was a founder of Elizabeth, New Jersey. Addison's father, born in Illinois, was a soldier at sixteen, a major at eighteen, and passed the sword at the surrender of Buena Vista and Mexico City. By 1848, he was in California, where he practised law at Benicia, then the state capital, engaged in politics, and acquired extensive properties. In 1889, he was appointed minister to the Central American states, with residence at Guatemala. He married in San Francisco Ella Watson, said to have been distantly related to Sir Joshua Reynolds. Her early life had been as adventurous as her husband's. After sojourns on the Mississippi, she and her family had sailed for San Francisco in 1853 by way of Panama, had been wrecked, and rescued on Santa Margarita Island off Lower California. "Mamma Mizner" was a grande dame, who presided with humor, understanding, and unruffled composure over her seven tumultuous offspring.
Education
The first evidence of Mizner's artistic talent appeared at twelve during a convalescence from a broken leg when he amused himself with drawing. Another formative experience came in 1889 when he and two brothers accompanied their parents to Guatemala, a place alive with romance and adventure. Here he attended the Instituto Nacional, mastered Spanish, and waxed enthusiastic over sixteenth-century Spanish colonial architecture and objets d'art. No doubt the broad, regular streets of massive masonry buildings impressed the youth who till then knew only the tinderbox shanties around San Francisco Bay. Returning home in 1890, he and his brother Wilson were sent to Bates Preparatory School, from which both were expelled within a few months. Pursuing his taste for Spanish culture, he crossed the Atlantic and, for a time, attended the University of Salamanca. His principal interest, however, lay in the historic buildings and arts of medieval Spain. At first coveting and collecting choice examples, he later discovered profit in buying and selling antiques. He soon abandoned formal education and embarked on a series of vagabond adventures.
Drawn to Honolulu on a false promise of a house-designing job, he garnered a tidy sum by drawing charcoal portraits, which were framed in red velvet. Here, for retrieving unspecified treasure, he received the Star of Kalakau and knighthood from Queen Liliuokalani. In Australia he colored lantern slides for an itinerant lecturer. Deciding finally on architecture as a career, he returned to Europe, where he characteristically resisted the usual academic course at the École des Beaux-Arts followed by most young Americans, preferring to study by sketching and by collecting portfolios of photographs.
Career
About 1897, Mizner returned to San Francisco, where for a time he submitted to the routine of designing bungalows in the architectural office of Willis J. Polk. Later that year, his old friend, José Maria Reina Barrios, now president-dictator of Guatemala, sought him out to build and furnish a magnificent new palace. The assassination of his presidential client, however, left Mizner free to join his younger brother, Wilson, and an older brother on the Yukon. Wilson, already a legendary figure, had gone to Alaska a year before, one of the first white adventurers there. Together, they joined the Klondike rush, made and lost fortunes, and built log trading-posts. From frontier gold fields, Addison turned, in 1904, to the hardly less gilded New York of Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, where he applied his wit and talents to the conquest of glittering dowagers. Through Mrs. Herman Oelrichs, he met Stanford White, who passed on to him some minor commissions too small for McKim, Mead & White to handle. His successful social climb was punctuated by the arrival of brother Wilson in 1906, who had behind him a fabulous career as an adventurer, gambler, and playwright. For Wilson's Hotel Rand, Addison dreamed up, in 1907, the fanciest bar in town. From 1911, he maintained an office for his architectural practice, but lacking the all-important prestige of Beaux-Arts training, he remained on the periphery of the profession. Many clients caught his genuine enthusiasm for Spanish antiques, and to supply increasing orders he ransacked Guatemala and Spain. Complaining that the city "destroyed his individuality, " he remodeled the Old Cow Bay Manor House at Port Washington, Long Island, dating in part from 1673, as a retreat where he dispensed prodigiously convivial hospitality.
In early 1918, discouraged, ill, and no doubt dampened by Wilson's recent escapades, Addison went south to recuperate in the sun of Palm Beach. There, on the piazza of the gargantuan yellow-and-white, wooden Royal Poinciana built by Henry M. Flagler he struck up an acquaintance with an equally bored lounger, Paris Eugene Singer, one of the twenty-four children of the perfecter of the sewing machine. Singer, British-born and prominent in Paris-Riviera international society, had come to New York in 1917 and had decided to introduce the Riviera type of resort on the Florida coast. In Mizner, he found a resourceful craftsman capable of materializing the most spectacular dreams. The first project was a convalescent hospital for fashionable French and British officers, overlooking "Lake" Worth, the lagoon back of the sand spit, Palm Beach. As it was rushed to completion despite the shortages of labor occasioned by the First World War, conservative residents threatened injunctions against its pastel stucco walls and red tile roofs. Gradually, they were overawed by this medieval Spanish monastery, low, rambling, picturesque, exuding an "Old World atmosphere" that by contrast made the older clapboarded structures naive and completely obsolete. After the armistice, it became the exclusive Everglades Club. In it, Mizner had set a fantastic fashion for the postwar boom decade. Before the club was finished, the new style was given the seal of social approval by Mr. and Mrs. Edward T. Stotesbury, who had passed many seasons at "The Breakers. " On their new estate, Mizner built "El Mirasol, " costing well over $1, 000, 000. Thereupon, he was deluged with commissions by postwar millionaires, to whom the Riviera had not yet been reopened, and who were intrigued to find this bit of European glamour so convenient to their Northern homes. Flagler's old Palm Beach was metamorphosed by the new Mizner Mediterranean villas of Harold Vanderbilt, Rodman Wanamaker, A. J. Drexel Biddle, Jr. , John S. Phipps, and twenty-three other major and minor social leaders. Even commercial properties confirmed, as in the picturesque stage-set of shops, open-air cafés, and restaurants in Via Mizner.
He was a pioneer in using "pecky" cypress, formerly used for piles and fence posts, as interior woodwork, texturing its rotted streaks with acid, blow-torch, and wire brushes. His cast-stone factory produced imitation granite, limestone, and marble, machined to simulate hand chiseling and "aged" by sand-blast and stain. The successful completion of Palm Beach forced him to seek new property to exploit. Twenty-six miles south, he selected Boca Raton, an almost uninhabited beach, and early in 1925 organized the Mizner Development Corporation. Addison was president, and Wilson vice-president and treasurer. To the latter, the financial backers, T. Coleman Du Pont and Jesse Livermore, demurred until Addison assured them he was at least up to the usual Florida standard. On the strength of Addison's undeniably imaginative plans for a whole resort city of hypothetical hotels, civic centers, country clubs, yacht basins, polo fields, Venetian canals, and an artificial lake, they sold over $30, 000, 000 worth of lots in six months a record that symbolized the pinnacle of boom hysteria.
By January 1, 1926, he set another record by opening the Ritz-Carlton Cloister complete with golf course; two hundred houses were built or underway. Mizner's reputation attracted a few commissions beyond Palm Beach. He designed the residence of Alfred Dietrich at Santa Barbara, California. At Pebble Beach, near Monterey, he built another for himself. At Jacksonville, Florida, he designed, in 1925, the Spanish-Romanesque Riverside Baptist Church. In the spring of 1926, the Florida bubble burst and almost overnight both finance and romantic architecture were rudely deflated. In 1927, Mizner was bankrupt. The hurricane of 1928 closed the Mizner era. Wilson went West to end his days as a Hollywood scriptwriter; but Addison remained in Palm Beach. Here he was chiefly occupied with setting down the effervescent antics of his extraordinary family. The first volume, published in 1932 as The Many Mizners, carried the story through his beloved mother's death in 1915. The Florida sequel was never finished. In 1930, he prepared the design for the Palm Beach Memorial Fountain, and he left unfinished the Palm Beach Post-Office and the Williams residence at St. Petersburg.
He died of heart disease at Palm Beach, and his ashes were taken to his native state.
Achievements
Mizner's first commissioned house, El Mirasol, built for Philadelphia financier Edward Stotesbury, had 37 rooms, a half-dozen patios, an illuminated pool and a 40-car underground garage. Mizner successfully tranformed Boca Raton from a small town into an international luxury resort. In the Boca Raton area, his names, Addison and Mizner, are frequently found on streets, businesses, and developments. On the grounds of the Boca Raton Resort and Club is Mizner Lake Estates, an intimate 15-estate gated enclave of million dollar homes with 24-hour security. In Delray Beach can be found Addison Reserve Country Club, a golf and tennis community of 717 luxury single-family homes situated on 653 acres. It consists of nineteen villages with names such as "Mirasol" and "Playa Riente". Also in Boca Raton is Mizner Park, an upscale "lifestyle center" with shops, rental apartments, and offices. In March 2005, to commemorate his visionary contributions to both the city and Florida architecture, an 11-foot-tall (3. 4 m) statue of the architect by Colombian sculptor Cristobal Gaviria was erected in Boca Raton at Mizner Boulevard and U. S. 1. In addition, Addison Mizner Elementary School in Boca Raton was named for him in 1968.
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An architect who excelled at transforming an architectu...)
Views
Despite annual pilgrimages to Europe in the company of Singer to cull new ideas and buy up a season's stock of antiques, Mizner confessed that "it was not really Spanish I was doing, " but "what I did was to turn Spanish inside out", transforming medieval fortress-palaces into gay, light, open, American suburban villas. He naively objected to copying and claimed it his "ambition to make a building look traditional, as though it had fought its way from a small unimportant structure to a great rambling house. " He took full advantage of the magnificently dramatic sites. Almost every room overlooked a gorgeous sweep of ocean and a quiet inner patio. Mizner was quick to exploit the flat Palm Beach terrain by silhouetting broken, picturesque red-tiled roofs and swaying palm fronds against the theatrically blue sky. The Spanish style was "so much a part of him that he could . .. adapt it joyously and surely to any location and any purse; and . .. after he had built, decorated, and furnished their houses . .. he helped his clients to enjoy them as he himself, their creator, enjoyed them". A sense of the theatre pervaded all he did. Completeness of illusion, inside and out, was his goal. His authentic knowledge of Mediterranean effects served him well. Finding true Spanish antiques too dear and of short life on the hot damp coast, and the proper building materials nowhere to be got, he did not hesitate in fact, he delighted to set up shops to manufacture at boom prices roof, floor, and decorative tiles, wrought-iron grills and hardware, stained glass, and antiqued furniture.
Quotations:
"What have I to live for? I've seen everything, been everywhere, done everything. "
"There was a young person of Tottenhem,
Whose manners, Good Lord! she'd forgotten them.
When she went to the vicar's,
She took off her knickers
Because she said she was hot in them. "
Personality
Singer's evaluation that "his work will live in the history of American architecture" illustrates the typically extravagant enthusiasm of his jaded clients, who hailed him as the "father of the Florida Renaissance. " The title is undeserved, since the Ponce de Leon Hotel at St. Augustine, designed for Flagler by John M. Carrère and Thomas Hastings, had already employed the style in 1887. More critical appraisal of his work reveals dubious structural durability, gross detail, and excessive theatricality. It is a part of that postwar exoticism that demanded Firenze tea-rooms and "atmospheric" cinemas. His real significance lies in expressing concretely in $50, 000, 000 worth of buildings the escapism of a rootless plutocracy and in symbolizing the irresponsible promoters who exploited it to the hilt.
Mizner has been described as the gay father of South Florida architecture. Mizner described himself as a "lifelong bachelor, " after "a few unsuccessful relationships with women in California and New York. " One modern researcher says that Wilson loved women sexually, but Addison cherished their friendship and companionship.
Quotes from others about the person
Mizner was described by Singer as "more than a great architect, he is the most delightful and enterprising of men . .. tall, imposing presence . .. health far from robust . .. always cheerful and hearty, his mastery of Tavern English is a joy to everybody within hearing. He gives the impression that his life is all laughter and fun. "
Connections
Mizner was never married and had no children.
Father:
Lansing Bond Mizner
December 5, 1825 – December 9, 1893
Was an American lawyer, diplomat, and politician.
