HOUSE & HOME/STYLE DESK

Building Outside the (Gray) Box: A Legacy of Curves and Colors

By BONNIE SCHWARTZ ( Interview ) 1197 words

It was a beautiful, fresh and bright hotel. One critic said that you had to put your sunglasses on when you walked in. The exterior was bright, too, clad with multicolored terra cotta. It was a beautiful place. Inside, I designed Lucite furniture so it wouldn't look cluttered, as the lobby was very, very narrow. I used every trick I knew to make it an exciting place, but New York hated it. People poked fun at it, but it was a very successful hotel.

Q: Your most unusual project?

A: A swimming pool in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn. I knew the neighborhood because I went to Brooklyn Boys' High School. It was actually a whole park -- all concrete. I built two swimming pools there, a diving pool and a long, Olympic-size pool, plus a grandstand. The most unusual thing about it was I created climbing structures for the kids, including a stepped, pyramid-shaped one that hid the pipes that ventilated the pool. That was some project. It took years to build.

Q: Some of your largest New York projects?

A: I did a very large apartment complex called Trump Village in Coney Island, with large grounds and walkways and gardens and a shopping complex. That was for Donald Trump's father. I also did the Americana Hotel on Seventh Avenue [now the Sheraton New York Hotel and Towers], which has about 2,000 rooms and is about 600 feet high. That's the largest single building I have ever done, and though it has been renovated over the years by other designers, its basic form is still as I originally designed it.

Q: You have always been an iconoclast in the field of architecture. What separated you from the pack?

A: I study people, not geometry. I look at how people react to the forms of architecture and have noticed certain things. People like bright colors. They are drawn to them. People are also like moths; they are drawn to light. Without knowing it, people gravitate to the brightest spots in a room. People like to meander -- we don't walk like soldiers in straight lines. So I have always created sweeping, curving, organic interiors, never rectilinear ones. I know that people love adornment and I give it to them. To me adornment has never been a dirty word.

I started out as a store designer and I learned everything I know from that base. When I finally got to do the Fontainebleu, I was able to incorporate all the things I had learned from my store work. It was a great success and people loved it. But the architects thought it was an atrocity; the design was totally antithetical to the Modernist cube. From that point on, for nearly 30 years, my work was never published. Still, clients loved it. For many years I had two large offices, one in New York, one in Miami, and work was always plentiful.

Q: What put you and your work back on the map?

A: It was 1990 and I had retired. I had given up trying to explain what I was doing and had actually thrown away most of my drawings in a Dumpster. Then a Swiss publisher, Birkhauser, called and said that European architects were clamoring to get their hands on anything at all I had done. So Birkhauser commissioned a book and I gave the publisher access to all of my photos. In 1992 I was invited to the Netherlands where an exhibition of these photos had been mounted. While I was there the first copy of the book arrived from the publisher. It was called ''Morris Lapidus: The Architect of the American Dream.'' Suddenly the whole world woke up. Even the American architects went for it.

Q: Do you feel that your work has substantially influenced the work of others?

A: Absolutely. Now I am seeing buildings done in the style of my own. Philip Johnson's Lipstick Building is a good example -- I think even he would admit that I have had an affect on how he thinks about shapes. Other architects are beginning to round the corners of their buildings, too. Whether they admit it is because of my influence or not, I don't know. I do know that now my work is considered a source that young architects look at and try to emulate. For me, it's a vindication.

Q: What is your prognosis for the future of architecture?

A: The 21st century will once and for all forget about building huge boxes. Buildings will curve, they will sweep, they will be colorfully lighted at night and they will have all sorts of ornament. The human species genetically reacts to curves. Early men built round huts, not square ones. Caves curved and swept.

Q: Who were your greatest influences?

A: Oscar Niemeyer, who curved all of his buildings. And, of course, Le Corbusier, who did rectangular buildings, but his greatest building is a sweeping, curving monastery. And then there is Frank Lloyd Wright, who always did squares and rectangles, but whose Guggenheim Museum is one huge spiral. Sooner or later all the great ones lose the boxes and rectangles.

Q: What have you not had a chance to build that you would like to?

A: I have two projects I have designed that would be a dream to see built. One is my Helix Building, a round building that is in constant motion. The other is a hotel that gets larger as it spirals up. But I don't know that I really want to build anymore. I will be 98 in November. I'll talk about things and hope to leave an influence, but no more buildings.