Morris Lapidus became famous with the building in front of you, the Fontainebleau Hotel, which set the template for the American resort hotel in the postwar era. When it opened in 1954 on the site of the old Harvey Firestone estate, the Fontainebleau was an immediate sensation. Lapidus designed it as pure theater: the curved main building sweeping in a dramatic crescent along the ocean frontage, the lobby a sweeping staircase leading to nothing in particular — what Lapidus called a 'staircase to nowhere,' designed to give women a stage to descend in their evening wear.
The pool deck became legendary, the site of James Bond scenes in Goldfinger, Frank Sinatra recordings, and a hundred Sports Illustrated swimsuit shoots. Critics hated it. The architectural establishment dismissed Lapidus as a vulgarian.
The public loved it extravagantly. Lapidus had understood something the critics missed: that people on vacation want fantasy, not refinement, and that a building can be an experience rather than an object. The hotel declined in the 1970s and 1980s, was renovated in the 1990s and again in 2008 after a major expansion added new towers.
Today it is again one of the preeminent resort properties in North America. Lapidus was right all along.