Fontainebleau Hotel
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The Fontainebleau Hotel is one of the most historically and architecturally significant hotels on Miami Beach. Built in 1954 and designed by Morris Lapidus, it is considered the best hotel on Miami Beach at the time of its opening and for a long time after that, and is also thought to be the most significant building in Lapidus's career.
In his 1996 autobiography Too Much is Never Enough, Lapidus wrote that if "American taste was being influenced by the greatest mass media of entertainment of that time, the movies.... So I designed a movie set!" The hotel was built by hotelier Ben Novak on the Firestone estate. Lapidus conceived of the ideas for the hotel each morning as he took a subway from Flatbush to his office in Manhattan.
It was featured in the James Bond movie Goldfinger, most notably in the sweeping aerial shot that follows the opening credits, and was the setting for Jerry Lewis comedy film, The Bellboy. It gained a second round of architectural fame by its inclusion in critic and novelist Tom Wolfe's From Bauhaus to Our House, published in 1981, which referred to the condescending way that Lapidus was treated by the architectural profession and critics. The Hotel, predominately the pool area, was featured in the 1983 film Scarface.
The hotel closed a large part of its property in 2006, though one building remains open to hotel guests,and the furnishings are currently available for sale. The expanded hotel and its new condominium buildings will re-open in 2008.[1].
