Addison Mizner: Architect of Fantasy and Romance

Description

The go-to architect for the Jazz Age elite of South Florida and beyond, Addison Mizner created a new architectural style and a new lifestyle for the wealthy and socially prominent of Palm Beach America s preeminent winter resort town of the time. Building mansions, clubs, hotels and apartment houses with a bent toward fantasy and romance, Mizner established a design vocabulary and tradition that to this day influences architects, designers, and builders. Evocative of old Spain, Venice, and the Moorish capitals of Granada and Seville, Mizner s work is a dream realized: courtyards with fountains, trellises with climbing bougainvillea, arched windows, glazed tile floors, spiraling marble columns, expansive interiors with grand proportions. This book explores Mizner s legacy through the extraordinary houses and other structures he built, including such storied homes as La Guerida, an 11-bedroom Spanish Revival mansion, best known now as the Kennedy Estate the place where JFK he composed his Inaugural Address. Known for their beauty, opulence, fantastic detail, as well as the stories of those individuals who have lived or played in them, the houses and buildings of Addison Mizner stand as monuments to grand living and romance made in stone and iron, stucco and tile.

Beth Dunlop is the author of Miami: Mediterranean Splendor and Deco Dreams and numerous other books, including Arquitectonica. She is editor in chief of Home Miami and an award winning architecture critic of the Miami Herald, as well as contributor to several national design and architecture magazines. Steven Brooke is a fellow of the American Academy in Rome and winner of the AIA National Institute Honor Award for photography. Based in Miami, he is the photographer for many Rizzoli books, including Historical Houses of Virginia and Miami Deco.