Not all influential municipalities have a mere handful of historically significant heroes when it comes to the built world, as most credit legions of professionals for the legacies left within their varied landscapes. Palm Beach retains a celebrated spot in the succinct category, as the most renowned architects known for creating its early stucco façades can be numbered on five fingers—Addison Mizner, Maurice Fatio, John Volk, Howard Major, and Marion Sims Wyeth to name these prolific practitioners. Mizner was the first of these to arrive in Palm Beach in 1918 at the invitation of sewing machine heir and future mega-client Paris Singer. One of the most lauded projects they realized is the Everglades Club.
“Having amassed a fortune much greater than his sizeable inheritance, Singer was consumed by euphoria from the Florida land boom of the 1920s,” notes architectural and social historian Augustus Mayhew III, who edited Addison Mizner: A Palm Beach Memoir, published by the Historical Society of Palm Beach County. The book shares Mizner’s first-person recollections from a hand-written manuscript the architect left about his life and work in Palm Beach. Mayhew credits Singer for turning the town into a world-class destination with the help of Mizner’s design prowess, an effort that began with Singer snapping up property and Mizner envisioning what would eventually become known as the Mediterranean Revival style.
Mizner’s only formal training was as an apprentice with San Francisco architect Willis Jefferson Polk, after which he began his own career as a licensed architect in California, New York, Pennsylvania, and Florida. He is known for being so detailed, he gave proper scale and proportion to everything from structural columns to chandelier shades. His great natural talent was cemented much earlier during a year-long convalescence when he was 15. An injured leg became so infected, the prescriptive was complete immobility. During that time, a voracious reader and a visual artist awakened in him. A book about how Charles Dickens trained his powers of observation was especially inspiring, as was a paint-box his brother Henry gave him. Before long, he was realizing accurate sketches and paintings, talents that would serve him well when he began to travel.
Mizner’s first exposure to other cultures took place when he was 16, and his father was appointed minister plenipotentiary to Guatemala, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras. The family moved to Guatemala City, where young Addison attended school for a year, and traveled regularly to nearby countries. This statement by the teen illustrates how the architecture he would create was already forming when he arrived in Mazatlan, Mexico, and declared it was possibly the greatest day of his life. “For there, lying white in the sun was my first Spanish town,” he explained. The excursions he took throughout his life are concretized in collages made from his drawings and photos, and other ephemera bound in 21 scrapbooks. Mayhew curated an online exhibition that features the architect’s artistry. In the foreword that accompanies the visuals, Michel Witmer, the chairman of the Fine Arts Committee of The Society of the Four Arts in Palm Beach wrote, “Mizner’s freehand drawings are of special note, a window into aesthetic impulses broadened over the span of decades and creative processes steeped in bygone architectural tableaus.”
As Witmer writes, Mizner’s sketches “record the creative development of what has become South Florida’s iconic architectural skyline.” Besides the Everglades Club, the projects Mizner realized are many, including Playa Riente, Casa Amado, Villa Mizner, Lagomar, Villa dei Fiori, and Via Mizner. Witmer says in the plans for these, Mizner was “importing Old-World elegance from centuries past and transforming it into Palm Beach’s signature style.” Photographer Steven Brooke, an adjunct professor at the University of Miami’s School of Architecture who photographed most of Mizner’s buidlings for the 2019 Rizzoli book Addison Mizner: Architect of Fantasy and Romance, is visually intimate with the architect’s work. “Mizner’s virtuosic architecture deserves a correspondingly thoughtful photographic approach,” he says. “Selecting precise times of day and establishing exacting positions from which to photograph are essential to truthfully depict his mastery of scale and proportion.”
Though Mizner achieved prominence in the built world, Mayhew says there was a humble side to him. He quotes the architect as saying about the Everglades Club: “It was the greatest surprise of my life that people liked it.” Mizner died in Palm Beach in 1933 at the age of 60, his career ending beforehand due to several bankruptcies from which his companies never recovered. There is a poignant tone in his counsel to those who follow: “To the small boys and girls, my advice is: Fight and study along the lines where your own sunrise lies.”
Story Credits:
Text by Saxon Henry
Gulf Stream Golf Club photos by Steven Brooke; Addison Mizner photo courtesy of Historical Society of Palm Beach County; Black and White Everglades Club photos courtesy of Historical Society of Palm Beach County; Color Everglades Club photo by Steven Brooke
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