Florida Architecture of Addison Mizner

By Addison Mizner

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Release date: Jan 17, 2013
• ISBN: 9780486142029

Addison Mizner

Addison Mizner was born in 1872 in Benicia, California, one of seven siblings. After numerous documented adventures in his early adult life, some disputed by biographers and historians, he later lived in New York City, and provided humorous illustrations to works by Ethel Watts Mumford. His lasting fame came when he moved to Palm Beach, Florida, at the age of 46, and became the definitive architect of the city, despite no formal training. He also developed Boca Raton into a luxurious resort community, using a similar approach to Spanish Revival architecture. A long-time socialite and bon viveur, he died at the age of 60, in February 1933.

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DOVER BOOKS ON ARCHITECTURE

THE TEN BOOKS OF ARCHITECTURE, Leon Battista Alberti. (0-486-25239-6)

LUXURY APARTMENT HOUSES OF MANHATTAN, Andrew Alpern. (0-486-27370-9)

THE ARCHITECT, OR PRACTICAL HOUSE CARPENTER (1830), Asher Benjamin. (0-486-25802-5)

ORNAMENTAL DESIGNS FROM ARCHITECTURAL SHEET METAL, Broschart & Braun. (0-486-27039-4)

VICTORIAN BRICK AND TERRA-COTTA ARCHITECTURE IN FULL COLOR, Pierre Chabat. (0-486-26164-6)

COUNTRY HOUSES AND SEASIDE COTTAGES OF THE VICTORIAN ERA, William T. Comstock. (0-486-25972-2)

CLASSIC MODERN HOMES OF THE THIRTIES, James Ford and Katherine Morrow Ford. (0-486-25927-7)

PICTORIAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF HISTORIC ARCHITECTURAL PLANS, DETAILS AND ELEMENTS, John Theodore Haneman. (0-486-24605-1)

ILLUSTRATED DICTIONARY OF HISTORIC ARCHITECTURE, Cyril Harris (ed.). (0-486-24444-X)

TOWARDS A NEW ARCHITECTURE, Le Corbusier. (Available in U.S. only.) (0-486-25023-7)

AMERICAN COUNTRY HOUSES OF THE GILDED AGE: SHELDON’S ARTISTIC COUNTRY SEATS, A. Lewis. (0-486-24301-X)

THE RAILROAD STATION: AN ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY, Carroll L. V. Meeks. (0-486-28627-4)

EARLY AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE, Hugh Morrison. (0-486-25492-5)

SPANISH-COLONIAL ARCHITECTURE IN THE UNITED STATES, Rexford Newcomb. (0-486-26263-4)

100 TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY BRICK BUNGALOWS WITH FLOOR PLANS, Rogers & Manson. (0-486-28119-1)

THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE, John Ruskin. (0-486-26145-X)

THE MODERN ARCHITECT, Edward Shaw. (0-486-28921-4)

PLANTATION HOUSES AND MANSIONS OF THE OLD SOUTH, J. Frazer Smith. (0-486-27848-4)

STURGIS’ ILLUSTRATED DICTIONARY OF ARCHITECTURE AND BUILDING, Russell Sturgis, et al. (0-486-26025-9, 0-486-26026-7, 0-486-26027-5) Three-volume set

THE AMERICAN VIGNOLA: A GUIDE TO THE MAKING OF CLASSICAL ARCHITECTURE, William R. Ware. (0-486-28310-0)

A VICTORIAN HOUSEBUILDER’S GUIDE, George E. Woodward & Edward G. Thompson. (0-486-25704-5)

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT: THE COMPLETE 1925 WENDINGEN SERIES, Frank Lloyd Wright. (Available in U.S. only.) (0-486-27254-0)

Paperbound unless otherwise indicated. Available at your book dealer, online at www.doverpublicadons.com, or by writing to Dept. 23, Dover Publications, Inc., 31 East 2nd Street, Mineola, NY 11501. For current price information or for free catalogs (please indicate field of interest), write to Dover Publications or log on to www.doverpublications.com and see every Dover book in print. Each year Dover publishes over 500 books on fine art, music, crafts and needlework, antiques, languages, literature, children’s books, chess, cookery, nature, anthropology, science, mathematics, and other areas.

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

Introduction copyright © 1992 by Donald W. Curl.

All rights reserved under Pan American and International Copyright Conventions.

This Dover edition, first published in 1992, is an unabridged republication of the work originally published by William Helburn, Inc., New York, in 1928. The Introduction by Donald W. Curl was written specially for the Dover edition.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Dover Publications, Inc., 31 East 2nd Street, Mineola, N.Y. 11501

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mizner, Addison, 1872–1933.

Florida architecture of Addison Mizner / Addison Mizner, with a new introduction by Donald W. Curl. p. cm.

An unabridged republication of the work originally published by William Helburn, Inc., New York, in 1928—T.p. verso.

9780486142029

1. Mizner, Addison, 1872-1933—Themes, motives. 2. Eclecticism in architecture—Florida. 3. Architecture, Spanish—Florida—Influence. 4. Vacation homes —Florida. I. Title.

NA737.M59A4 1992

720’.92—dc20

92-22830 CIP

Table of Contents

DOVER BOOKS ON ARCHITECTURE

Title Page

Copyright Page

INTRODUCTION TO THE DOVER EDITION

CHECKLIST OF MIZNER BUILDINGS, IN ORDER SHOWN IN PHOTOGRAPHS

FOREWORD

APPRECIATION OF A LAYMAN

ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION TO THE DOVER EDITION

Addison Mizner and Alice DeLamar

DURING THE 1920s, American publishers discovered the reading public’s interest in architecture and brought out numerous volumes on individual architects’ work and various architectural styles. One of the most lavish of these books, Florida Architecture of Addison Mizner, published in 1928, presented 184 photographs of 40 of the architect’s creations in Palm Beach, Boca Raton and Jacksonville, reproduced in the rich sepia tones of the rotogravure process.

Mizner personally autographed 100 copies of a special deluxe, gold-tooled, red-Morocco-leather-bound and slipcased Edición Imperial of Florida Architecture of Addison Mizner for friends and clients. In one copy of the deluxe edition the architect wrote: To Alice / My Lorenzo the Magnificent / Addison. Certainly Alice A. DeLamar well deserved the tribute. She had conceived of the idea for the book, aided in the photography, edited its copy, designed its pages and, after securing a publisher, subsidized its production. Calling the book a monument to Mizner—flowers to the living instead of the dead—DeLamar also helped sell $300 subscriptions to almost a hundred friends and clients of the architect for the deluxe edition.

When Addison Cairns Mizner (1872–1933) arrived in Palm Beach in 1918, Henry M. Flagler’s Royal Poinciana and Breakers hotels dominated both the social and architectural life of the resort. Although a few pioneer resorters had built their own houses, the hotels still served as the center for society, providing the facilities for golf and tennis, and for swimming at the oceanfront Breakers’ casino pool and beach. Moreover, afternoon-tea dances at the Royal Poinciana’s Cocoanut Grove, multicourse dinners at both hotels and elaborate parties dedicated to special charities or marking annual observances, such as the Washington’s Birthday Ball of February 22 that officially ended the season, drew hotel guests and cottagers alike.

Architecturally the Colonial Revival detailing of the wooden frame hotels, painted Flagler yellow with white trim, in no way reflected their semitropical setting. Theodore Blake, a draftsman for Carrère & Hastings, the New York firm that designed Flagler’s St. Augustine hotels and his Palm Beach mansion, drew up the plans for the Royal Poinciana in 1893. Flagler insisted that the St. Augustine buildings should reflect that city’s Spanish heritage. But although Blake had come to Carrère & Hastings from the St. Augustine concern of McDonald and McGuire (the contractors for all of Flagler’s Florida buildings), there was no hint of the Spanish in his Palm Beach project. Over the years, Blake’s original six-story hotel on the shores of Lake Worth grew to become a vast sprawling structure that could house 1,200 guests and seat 1,600 in its immense dining room.

The Breakers opened as the Palm Beach Inn in 1896 and proved popular with hotel guests from the first. After a 1903 fire destroyed the L-shaped four-story building, Flagler built a much larger U-shaped five-story hotel in its place. These hotels attracted America’s captains of industry and its social elite. By the turn of the century, newspapers were referring to Palm Beach as the winter Newport.

From the beginning, some vacationers preferred to own their own resort houses. Built for use only a few months of the year, the generally unpretentious shingle-style or Queen Anne cottages lined the shore of Lake Worth. Although Flagler completed Whitehall, a million-dollar white-marble mansion, in 1902 as a wedding gift for Mary Lily Kenan, his third wife, most resort cottages remained small and