Art Deco Tips & Guide

By Alfred Tanya


Miami Beach is much far more than a tropical paradise plus a popular tourist destination, it's wealthy with history, culture, and several of the most remarkable and exclusive architecture inside the globe.

Art Deco could be the most prevalent and recognizable style of architecture in Miami Beach. Art Deco is an eclectic artistic and style style that began in Paris within the 1920s and flourished internationally throughout the 1930s, into the World War II era.

The Miami Beach Art Deco District contains the largest concentration of Deco resort architecture in the globe, with some thirty blocks of vibrantly colored hotels and apartment houses dating from the 1920s to the 1940s. These buildings represent an era when Miami was heavily promoted and developed as a "tropical playground."

Art Deco is regarded as one of the very first twentieth century architectural styles in America to break with conventional revival forms to embrace influences from numerous diverse styles which includes Neoclassical, Constructivism, Cubism, Modernism and Futurism. Constructing forms in the style had been generally angular and clean, with stepped back facades, symmetrical or asymmetrical massing and strong vertical accenting. The preferred decorative language included geometric patterns, abstracted natural forms, contemporary industrial symbols and ancient cultural motifs employing Mayan, Egyptian and Indigenous American themes.

In Ocean Beach (now referred to as South Beach) architects used a unique type of nearby imagery to develop what we now call "Tropical Deco". The style employed nautical themes also as tropical floral and fauna motifs. Ocean liners, palm trees, and flamingos graced the exteriors and interiors of the new nearby architecture. The favored materials for executing this distinctive "art" decor included bas-relief stucco, keystone, etched glass, many different metals, cast concrete, patterned terrazzo, and other people.

Considerably of the Art Deco designs may be attributed to architect Morris Lapidus. His first huge commission was the Miami Beach Sans Souci Hotel, followed closely by the Nautilus, the Di Lido, the Biltmore Terrace, and also the Algiers, all along Collins Avenue, and amounting to the single-handed redesign of an entire district. The hotels had been an immediate popular achievement. Then in 1952 he landed the job of the largest luxury hotel in Miami Beach, the Fontainebleau Hotel, 1 of by far the most historically and architecturally significant hotels on Miami Beach and believed to be one of the most important creating of Lapidus's career.

Before the Fontainebleau's 27 colors of paint had dried, Lapidus had his second major commission, the Eden Rock, a luxury hotel to be located suitable next door. Around 1960, Lapidus was commissioned to redesign Lincoln Road. Lapidus's design for Lincoln Road, complete with gardens, fountains, shelters and an amphitheater, reflected the Miami Contemporary Architecture, or "MiMo", style that Lapidus pioneered inside the 1950s. The Road was closed to visitors and became 1 of the nation's 1st pedestrian malls.

Art Deco continues to be a well-known style amongst buyers coming to the South Beach market. I have sold much more art deco properties than I can count and I take pleasure in discovering the distinctive attributes to each and every Art Deco property...no two getting exactly the same. I recently closed a sale at Harriet Court on 1508 Pennsylvania Avenue for $385,000. Harriet Court, like a lot of

Art Deco properties, has been fully renovated and elegantly blends the past using the present, encompassing all of today's contemporary design features and amenities.




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