Hotels and Casinos Architect Alan Lapidus dies aged 85


Alan Lapidus, a New York architect with a playful and pragmatic style who designed major hotels and casinos, died October 15 at his home in Naples, Maine. He was 85 years old.

His son, Adam Lapidus, said the cause was prostate cancer.

Mr. Lapidus’ legacy included the lofty Crowne Plaza Times Square Manhattan, designed to evoke a dazzling Wurlitzer jukebox; the now demolished Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City; Caesar’s Palace hotel and casino complex in Las Vegas; and the Hilton Hotel at Disney World in Orlando.

Before opening his own studio in 1976, Mr. Lapidus worked for 13 years for his father, Morris, a brilliant designer of flamboyant postmodern hotels in Miami Beach (including Fontainebleau, Eden Roc, and Americana). a kind of disgrace among the condescending critics of the time. (The buildings later came to be seen as architectural classics.)

But Alan Lapidus, if not his father, received positive endorsement in 1972 in connection with his only project that garnered rave reviews from Ada Louis Huxtable, then The New York Times architecture critic of the Morris Lapidus firm. had a public interest pool and relaxation complex The impoverished Bedford-Stuyvesant is in Brooklyn.

As Miss Huxtable writes this, Morris Lapidus, those who died in 2001, He designed the project, when Alan Lapidus joined the firm, “a new design philosophy emerged” and he showed himself in projects such as the pool, which he considered “a serious, sophisticated solution, not a glitter,” to urban destruction. “Good and proper,” he pronounced.

“I never spoke of criticism to my father, but of course he had read it,” wrote Alan Lapidus (pronounced LAP-ih-dus) in his memoirs “Everything by Design: My Life as an Architect” (2007). “And he never told me about it.”

Credit…through the Lapidus family

Mr. Lapidus did not try to outdo his father, whose motto was “too much is never enough”. But he followed his advice, designing palatial lodgings and expansive gambling halls to create a “participatory theater” where guests could “indulge and fulfill their fantasies.”

“His theory was that if you create the stage setting and it’s big, everyone who enters will play their part,” said Alan Lapidus. He adopted another of his father’s axioms: “Design for your client’s clients.”

This requires, for example, sinuous motifs to eliminate long, dreary corridors, or windows set lower to the floor to make hotel rooms feel brighter and guests taller. It also meant home to numerous shops and spas.

“The main concern of the management of every casino I designed,” Mr. Lapidus said, “was how to keep his wife or girlfriend busy and how to keep him away from his man while losing the mortgage money.”

Alan Harvey Lapidus was born on September 27, 1936 in Brooklyn and grew up in the Flatbush neighborhood. His father was an immigrant from the Black Sea city of Odessa. His mother, Beatrice (Perlman) Lapidus, was a housewife.

He graduated from Midwood High School, where he was named “Best Writer” despite his classmates being included. Erich Segal, future Yale classics professor who will write the best-selling novel “Love Story” and other books. Mr. Lapidus once said he would have become a writer himself if his family had not pressured him to do otherwise.

But he said he became more inclined towards architecture after watching Gary Cooper play an architect in the 1949 movie. “Cesmebasi” He is having a passionate moment with his boss’s daughter. (“This will throw all thoughts of dental school into the background,” Mr. Lapidus wrote.)

He enrolled at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., but dropped out after his sophomore year to join the army. He later attended Columbia’s School of General Studies and graduated from the university’s School of Architecture in 1963.

His marriages to Rochelle Greenberg and Nancy Hoffman ended in divorce. In addition to his son, his wife Caroline Worthington, a concert cellist, from his marriage to Ms. Greenberg; and four grandchildren.

Mr. Lapidus was also a licensed pilot and served as an assistant police officer for a time in New York while working as an architect. His design career, he said, included an episode where four government agents pretended to be partners of his company on a flight to Havana, when they encountered clients involved in organized crime and at a time when the Clinton administration was secretly trying to normalize relations with Cuba.

Other projects Mr. Lapidus worked on included the Gild Hall hotel in Manhattan’s Financial District and the Puerto Rico resort hotel El Conquistador.

In his book, he didn’t get enough praise for Donald J. Trump, who hired Mr. Lapidus to design the flamboyant Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City. (The building had a relatively short life. It opened in 1984, demolished in february, less than a month after Mr Trump left the White House and nearly a dozen years after he cut ties with the hotel and casino in a string of bankruptcy filings, but his name was still tied.)

Mr. Lapidus was 18 when he first met Mr. Trump, who was still a boy at the time, through their father. Morris Lapidus was working with developer Fred Trump on an apartment complex in Brooklyn in the mid-1950s. In his book, Mr. Lapidus described Donald Trump as “the most honored developer I’ve ever worked with”.

Still, in light of a career that included the bankruptcy and partial collapse of a building he was working on in Puerto Rico, he took a more dim view of his own profession.

After dealing with contractors, lenders, and finicky clients, and discovering that only a third of the buildings he designed were actually built, Mr. Lapidus concluded in his memoirs: “The surest way to get rich by designing is not to design. like having them.”

“Architecture has been called the ‘second oldest profession’,” she wrote, “but sometimes it looks a lot like her older sister.”



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