What a scene it must have been. A century ago this year in Paris, the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts took over the Esplanade des Invalides, the quays on the left and right banks of the Seine, and the grounds of the Grand Palais and Petit Palais from April 28 to November 30. Twenty-one countries participated in the event, which was billed as an aesthetic renewal of the modern decorative arts, and, by most accounts, the birth of Art Deco. Miami Beach was one of the multiple American cities to be swept up in the principles of this movement, which would have a profound impact on the town’s aesthetics, particularly in the area we now call South Beach.
The Paris exhibition’s producers intended to establish a link between modern architecture and the decorative arts, a cause those designing buildings on Miami Beach took up with gusto. “Although coordination between architects is never explicit, an ‘echo effect’ is often discernable in the work of competing architects,” writes Miami architect Allan T. Shulman in The Making of Miami Beach, which he co-authored with Jean-François Lejeune. “The overall consistency of forms and details between all the architects of the era is remarkable.” These practitioners, who brought a second period of expansion to Miami Beach during the 1930s and 1940s, were following on the heels of an earlier frenzy in the 1920s when the Mediterranean Revival style sprang up all over town. The catastrophic damage caused by the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 and the crippling effects of the Great Depression in 1929 were responsible for the gap between the two historic building booms.
Once America turned the page to the new decade in 1930, Art Deco was an exuberant new aesthetic in two of the country’s most significant cities. Gleaming skyscrapers and grand hotels in the style rose in New York City, and Art Deco civic and office buildings sprang up throughout Chicago’s downtown. During the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago, dubbed “A Century of Progress,” the Florida Tropical Home by architect Robert Law Weed was exhibited (he also designed Miami Beach Fire Station Number 3 on Pinetree Drive with its distinctive Art Deco style). Some of the biggest names who grabbed onto the trend in Miami Beach include Henry Hohauser, Lawrence Murray Dixon, Roy F. France, and the duo of Igor Polevitzky and Thomas Triplett Russell. Their contributions include Dixon’s The Victor Hotel, built on Ocean Drive in 1937, with its double-height lobby and porthole windows running along one side of the front of the building. Polevitzky and Triplett Russell designed the Albion in 1939 whose most eye-catching Art Deco feature is the implied circular form that rises above the streamlined corner of the building emblazoned with its name. And there’s Hohauser’s 1935 Colony Hotel, which sits quaintly on Ocean Drive with “eyebrows” that extend out to shade the windows, a detail that was considered an early modernist move in Miami and Miami Beach.
“Between 1934 and 1942, around 1,200 pieces of architecture were built on Miami Beach,” notes Mark Gordon, the deputy director of the Miami Design Preservation League (mdpl.org), the nonprofit founded by the late Barbara Baer Capitman to save and protect many of South Beach’s historic Art Deco structures. “[Because of Art Deco,] Ocean Drive is one of the most recognized streets in the world. When I go to Europe and tell people I’m from here, their eyes light up!”
Said reaction is not surprising when you consider Miami Beach’s resort architecture was designed to mimic a theatrical set that would attract and wow tourists. “Like Renaissance architects, the modern builders of Miami Beach were conscious of creating both the stage and the city,” Shulman explains in his book. The World’s Fair in New York in 1939 was the last event of the decade to make a significant impact on the architects who were designing on Miami Beach. The visionaries behind The World of Tomorrow exhibition included avant-garde illumination in their schematics, just as the participants in the Paris exhibition had done. In New York, it was tubes of colorful neon that lit the faces of fairgoers and inspired the next moves made by those who intended to bring a sense of after-dark drama to Miami Beach. The coalescing of these influences that coursed from continent to continent has defined Miami Beach’s architectural heritage, which still captivates the way it was always meant to.
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Text by Saxon Henry
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