A recent article by Reinier de Graaf in The Architectural Review declared that architecture, rather than being a noble pursuit that makes the world a better place for humanity, has become a tool of capital.
In other words, developers hire architects to sell real estate with designs that appeal to the target market. They could be progressive, or they could be rooted in tradition. But at least they must catch the eye and capture the imagination. And the checkbook.
In Florida, this is a time-honored practice. In the 1920s land boom, architects were used to create grandiose structures that would sell the new real estate developments popping up on every corner.
The 1926 Aiken House is one of two houses in Boca Raton's historically designated Old Floresta neighborhood that are on the National Register of Historic Places. Its first occupant was Fred Aiken in 1928. The house, at 801 Hibiscus Street, sold for $879,000 in March 2015. It has 2,800 square feet. The new owner intends to restore the interior. Staff photo / Harold Bubil; 8-2-2015.
Nowhere was this more evident in such instant communities as Coral Gables, south of Miami, and Boca Raton, 25 miles south of Palm Beach. The Mediterranean revival style, as composed by Addison Mizner from elements found in Spain, Italy and north Africa, created buildings that looked as if they had been there for centuries, even though the painters often were walking out the back door as the buyers walked in the front.
The get-rich-quick investors of the 1920s boom wanted to feel they were buying into something of permanence. Mizner’s style gave it to them, and it was parodied in boomtime developments across the state, including Sarasota and Venice.
Mizner, who started with his 1918 Everglades Club on Worth Avenue in Palm Beach, and went on to design mansions for that city’s winter elite, wasn’t satisfied with just designing houses. He dreamed of developing a world-class resort at Boca Raton — “the Dream City of the Western World,” according to one breathless newspaper advertisement — halfway between Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach. His slick advertising campaign made promises “as good as the God-given soil,” and included a 700-room Ritz-Carlton, a smaller hotel on the mainland and a 160-foot-wide boulevard, the Camino Real, that would be lined with royal palms on either side of a grand canal.
He made good on building the smaller hotel, which he named the Cloister, but not much more than that before the real estate boom and bust and Mizner Development Corp. went bankrupt. The Camino Real has the royal palms, but the canal was little more than a ditch that has long since been filled in. He also designed 29 houses for his managers in a neighborhood now historically designated and known as Old Floresta.
The Boca Raton Resort & Club traces its origins to boomtime architect Addison Mizner's Cloister Inn, built in 1925. Mizner dreamed of making Boca Raton a world-class resort, but the crash of the Florida Land Boom put a halt to that. He died bankrupt in 1933. Staff photo / Harold Bubil; 8-2-2015.
The Cloister is now the Boca Raton Resort & Club, a five-star palace on a lagoon with a golf course and lush landscaping. Operated by Waldorf Astoria, it is one of Florida’s top non-beachfront resorts.
Boca Raton, which had just a few dozen inhabitants when Mizner launched his development effort, has grown into a center of wealth. It also is the quintessential Florida retirement community for the wealthy.
But it is in Old Floresta where the charm of Boca Raton thrives. Most of the small, original houses have been restored, and large new ones have been built next door. The neighborhood is one of the most desirable in the area, say real estate agents who have sold properties there.
“If you don’t have a boat, this is the No. 1 community” in Boca Raton, said Victor Beuses of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Florida Realty.
Beuses recently sold one of Mizner’s original Old Floresta houses, at 801 Hibiscus, to an architect for $879,000. The Mizner design “was one of the deciding factors for the new owner. He asked people where they would buy if they were looking for a home. Everyone said, without question, Old Floresta.
“When you are in there, you don’t even feel as if you are in Boca Raton. Every single house is different from the other; you have the narrow, tree-lined streets. And everything has a history.”
And what a history it is. Boca Raton’s transformation from farming village to boomtime dream resort has been told in several books, most recently “The Florida Land Boom of the 1920s,” by Gregg M. Turner (McFarland & Co., 2015).
This section of the Boca Raton Resort & Club was built as the Cloister, aka the Cloister Inn, by Addison Mizner in 1925. Shortly after its grand opening in early 1926, Mizner Development Corp. was bankrupt. The hotel tower in the background was built in the late 1960s. Staff photo / Harold Bubil; 8-2-2015.
Mizner, a native Californian, came to Florida in 1918 with his sickly friend, sewing machine heir Paris Singer, who got the idea of building a convalescent hospital for soldiers returning from World War I. Mizner, who called himself an architect even though he had no license, would design it.
The war ended before the building was completed, so the two men converted it into the posh Everglades Club. Its Mediterranean-influenced architecture was a hit with Palm Beach’s wealthy, as was Mizner’s charming personality. They started hiring him to design winter homes.
“The architecture was vaguely Spanish,” wrote Geoffrey Perrett in his 1982 book, “America in the Twenties.” “The architects who designed it came from all over the United States. They knew next to nothing about Florida, yet right away they had to create buildings with a ‘Floridian’ character.
Much of what resulted was on par with that other bastard architecture of the age, the big-city picture palace, running as it did to the grotesque and dramatic.”
Perrett described Mizner as an “upper-class con man” who was skilled in “charming rich people into offering him commissions.”
But the architect yearned to become a developer. Boca Raton was described in an advertisement — clever marketing came into its own as a real estate sales tool during the 1920s boom — as “the culminating achievement of an inspired architect.” In fact, the state board of architecture called Mizner on the carpet for practicing without a license. Armed with stacks of drawings and talking a good game, he was granted a license “on the basis that he had passed a Senior Examination,” wrote Turner, of Fort Myers, in his new book.
In just eight months of 1925, Boca Raton went from dream on paper to partial reality. But then the boom — a speculative frenzy of trading in property binders by investors looking to get rich quick — crested and started to fade. By the time Mizner opened the Cloister Inn in February 1926, he knew the party was over.
In his 1994 book “Panic in Paradise,” lawyer and historian Raymond Vickers verifies Perrett’s “upper-class con man” allegation by examining long-secret bank records and discovering that Boca Raton, like many South Florida boomtime developments, was rotten with bank fraud, insider abuse and interlocking directorates.
“Addison Mizner participated in a bank-fraud conspiracy that financed his extravaganza with depositors’ money,” wrote Vickers of the Boca Raton development effort. “Mizner looted the bank by using worthless promissory notes to procure loans.”
Before long, the Boca Raton project was bankrupt, as were many other developments when Florida “ran out of suckers.”
In October 1927, the hotel and all the debt associated with it was bought for $71,500 by Clarence Geist, who enlarged it. It reopened as the Boca Raton Club in 1930.
Mizner died in 1933 of a heart attack. He was worth $2,500 at the time.
Despite his business dealings, his architectural legacy still influences designers, developers and home buyers today.
His architecture has a certain scale and dignity that takes a deft hand and experience eye to emulate.
“Sensitivity to proportion and tuning” is how Sarasota architect Thorning Little describes Mizner’s design strength. “Some people get it; they have a sense for proportion. Mizner had it. He had the sizzle, and that sense of theatrics, to make a room like a stage.”
But it was left to others, in the bona fide boom of the 1950s and ‘60s, to make Boca Raton the magnetic resort city that it remains today.
