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Is American art washed up?
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too much is never enough
BY MORRIS LAPIDUS
BY CHARLES TAYLOR in the memorable climax of playwright Moss Hart's autobiography, "Act One," Hart shows up at his family's Brooklyn tenement apartment the morning after "Once in a Lifetime," the great play he wrote with George S. Kaufman, opens on Broadway to rave reviews. Telling his family he's moving them away from what, quoting Ruth Gordon, he calls "the dark brown taste of being poor," he piles them into a Manhattan-bound cab. Then, alone in the old apartment, he recklessly throws open the windows to let in a driving rainstorm that ruins the threadbare carpets and furniture that, for Hart, had defined his family's poverty. In some basic way, the career of architect Morris Lapidus, recounted in his thoroughly entertaining biography, "Too Much Is Never Enough," could be described as Hart's gesture repeated again and again on an ever larger scale. A Russian Jew who came to America before his first birthday, Lapidus found fame as a designer of Art Deco stores, and then infamy as the architect of such monuments to American kitsch as the Miami hotels the Eden Roc and the Fountainbleu. Lapidus never claims that his family was desperately poor. But when he writes about the impression made on him by a childhood trip to Coney Island, or the sight of Luna Park at night, or simply wandering along railroad tracks with a neighborhood friend to see a field of flowers, he's hinting at the taste for color and ostentation and luxury that defined his architecture. During the 1930s and '40s, Lapidus designed a series of stores that made innovative use of curved glass, hidden lighting, long sweeping lines and "floating" modernistic shapes on the walls and ceilings. The effect was to turn the stores into open, inviting spaces that attracted customers and impelled them to come inside. By the '50s, he was ready to realize his ideas on a bigger canvas. The wildly popular resort hotels that resulted -- in a style that might be called rococo modern -- were lambasted by most of the architectural establishment (Philip Johnson was a notable, eloquent exception). Lapidus acknowledges those charges here in a manner that used to be called "gentlemanly." What matters about this in-many-ways-typical American success story, told in straightforward, meat-and-potatoes prose, is that Lapidus' work stands for the necessity of acknowledging public taste in buildings meant for the public's use. "Bauhaus and the International School were considered the leaders of design," Lapidus writes. "The critics loved it, but the critics were not going to be guests at the Fountainbleu ... I finally realized that American taste was being influenced by ... the movies. So I imagined myself the set designer for a movie producer who wanted to create a hotel that would make a tremendous impression on the viewers ... So I designed a movie set."
Like Karal Ann Marling's "Graceland," "Too Much Is Never Enough" is a testament to the vitality and optimism of American kitsch. Lapidus, who is 95, created buildings that are democracy in action. They embody his faith that the quotidian can contain luxury, and an even greater belief in the prerogative of people to realize their own tastes and reinvent themselves accordingly -- even if it's just two weeks' vacation spent imagining themselves as movie stars in the midst of his wonderfully frivolous swank. A '70s retrospective of Lapidus' work was called "An Architecture of Joy." This charming book reveals the source of that joy in Lapidus' marvelous talent for living.
Charles Taylor lives in Boston. He is a regular contributor to Salon. |
