Abroad in New York
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
In 1981 Tom Wolfe wrote “From Bauhaus to Our House.” This was not, as it was widely presumed to be, an attack on Modernist architecture as such, but rather on the then-triumphant strain of ideological Modernism that had its source in the 1920s German design academy called the Bauhaus. This strain, shall we say, had overstayed its welcome in New York. It is rather startling, for those of us of a certain age, to realize that Mr. Wolfe’s book was closer in time to the construction of the Pan Am Building (18 years) than to today (25 years).
In his book, Mr. Wolfe suggested there was an alternative Modernism that, because it had rejected the ideology, the architectural establishment scorned. He wrote of several architects in the alternative strain: Eero Saarinen, Edward Durell Stone, and Morris Lapidus. Twenty-five years on, “advanced” opinion scorns these architects no longer. Indeed, Stone and Lapidus are tres chic.
Lapidus was born in Odessa, Ukraine, and grew up in Brooklyn. As a boy he visited Luna Park, that exotic wonderland at Coney Island.Young Lapidus decided to be an architect, so he could create Luna Park-like experiences to entrance people as he had been entranced.
After attending architecture school at Columbia, Lapidus worked as a retail designer. It wasn’t until he was 52, in 1954, that he got the commission that made him famous, or infamous: the Fontainebleau Hotel, in Miami Beach. It and his later Miami Beach hotels epitomized the “populuxe” or pop baroque style that expressed a giddy age of mass middleclass tourism, the age of what Mr. Wolfe called the middle-class “happiness boom.” Sophisticated people, of course, abhorred the vulgarity of these hotels, their pandering to debased middle-class notions of luxurious living. The public, however, flocked to these hotels, and the movies and TV liked them, too. More than half a century after the Fontainebleau opened, sophisticated taste embraces these hotels. It’s not just Tom Wolfe anymore: Rem Koolhaas, too, loves Lapidus.
The turn of taste was evident when New York designated the Loews Summit Hotel a landmark. In 1959 Manhattan was ready to build (hard to believe!) its first hotel in 30 years. Lapidus got the job. Now a Doubletree, the hotel is on the southeast corner of Lexington Avenue and 51st Street.
The hotel looks much as it ever has. The sign projecting from the Lexington facade seems as much vintage Vegas as Miami, the letters carried on stainless-steel ovoids perpendicular to a blank wall of sheet aluminum. On 51st, the walls have a rhythmical patterning of powder-blue rectangles on a background of dark blue-green shiny tiles. The north wall extends about two thirds of the way to Third Avenue. At the wall’s one-third point, it cuts back from the lot line at a 45 degree angle. Another third of the way east, it straightens back out, to a deep setback. It’s perfectly atrocious. But, God help me, the snaky motion – it kind of gets to you.
