Alan Lapidus, a New York architect with a playful and pragmatic style who designed large hotels and casinos, died on October 15 at his Naples, Maine home. He was 85.
The cause is prostate cancer, said his son Adam Lapidus.
Mr. Lapidus’ legacy included the towering Crowne Plaza Times Square Manhattan, designed to conjure up a stunned Wurlitzer jukebox; the now demolished Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City; the Caesars Palace hotel and casino complex in Las Vegas; and the Hilton Hotel at Disney World in Orlando, Florida.
Before opening his own studio in 1976, Mr. Lapidus (pronounced LAP-ih-dus) worked for 13 years for his father Morris, a formidable designer of extravagant postmodern hotels in Miami Beach – including the Fontainebleau, the Eden Roc, and Americana – which was back then had commercial success, along with some sort of shame among the scornful critics. (The buildings were later considered architectural classics.)
But Alan Lapidus, if not his father, received positive recognition in 1972 in connection with the only Morris Lapidus project, which was praised, albeit cautiously, by Ada Louis Huxtable, then architecture critic of the New York Times. It had to do with a public Swimming pool and recreation complex in the poor Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn.
Mrs. Huxtable wrote, while Morris Lapidus, who died in 2001, had conceived the project, “a new design philosophy emerged” when Alan Lapidus joined the company, which manifested itself in projects like the pool – which in their opinion was “not a glitter, but a serious, sophisticated solution” for the urban blight. She pronounced it “well and appropriately”.
“I never mentioned the review to my father, but of course he had read it,” wrote Alan Lapidus in his memoir “Everything by Design: My Life as an Architect” (2007). “And he never mentioned it to me.”
Credit…Peter Simon
Mr. Lapidus did not try to outdo his father, whose motto was “Too much is never enough”. But he followed his advice and designed palatial accommodations and spacious arcades in order to create a “hands-on theater” in which guests could “enjoy and fulfill their fantasies”.
“His theory was that everyone who walks in has their part in creating the set and it’s great,” said Alan Lapidus. He adopted another axiom from his father: “Design for your customer’s customers”.
This would require curved motifs, for example, to eliminate long, gloomy hallways, or lower-lying windows to make hotel rooms brighter and make the guests appear taller. It also meant housing lots of shops and spas.
“The main management concern of any casino I have designed,” said Mr. Lapidus, “was to keep the wife or girlfriend busy and keep her away from her husband while he loses 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 voted “Best Writer” even though his classmates were among them Erich Segal, the future Yale classics professor who would write the bestselling novel “Love Story” and other books. Without the pressure of his family, Mr Lapidus once said, he would have become a writer too.
But he said he became more accessible to architecture after seeing Gary Cooper who played an architect in the 1949 film “The fountain head”, a passionate moment with his boss’s daughter. (“That will turn all thoughts about dental training on its back,” wrote Mr. Lapidus.)
He enrolled at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, but dropped out after his sophomore year to join the Army. He then attended Columbia University’s School of General Studies and graduated from the university’s School of Architecture in 1963.
His marriages to Rochelle Greenberg and Nancy Hoffman were divorced. In addition to his son from his marriage to Mrs. Greenberg, he left behind his wife Caroline Worthington, a concert cellist; and four grandchildren.
Mr. Lapidus was also a licensed pilot and served as an auxiliary cop in New York City while serving as an architect. His career as a designer included encounters with clients involved in organized crime and an episode in which four government officials posed as employees of his company on a flight to Havana when the Clinton administration was secretly trying to close ties with Cuba normalize.
Other projects Mr. Lapidus worked on included the Gild Hall Hotel in Manhattan’s Financial District and the El Conquistador Resort Hotel in Puerto Rico.
In his book, he couldn’t praise Donald J. Trump enough for commissioning Mr. Lapidus to design the glitzy Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City. (The building, however, had a relatively short lifespan. Opened in 1984, it was demolished in February, less than a month after Mr Trump left the White House and about a dozen years after being disconnected from the hotel and casino in a series of bankruptcy filings despite his name remaining attached.)
Mr Lapidus was 18 when he first met the then young Mr Trump through their fathers. At that time, in the mid-1950s, Morris Lapidus was working with developer Fred Trump on an apartment complex in Brooklyn. In his book, Mr. Lapidus described Donald Trump as “the most honorable developer I have ever worked with”.
However, given a career that included bankruptcy and the partial collapse of a building he was working on in Puerto Rico, he saw his own profession a little more somber.
After studying with property developers, lenders, and finnicky customers, and realizing that only about a third of the structures he designed were actually built, Mr. Lapidus concluded in his memoir that “the safest way to go is by designing Getting rich in buildings is not so much designing ”. to own them in order to own them. “
“Architecture has been called the ‘second oldest profession,'” he wrote, “but sometimes it bears a great resemblance to her older sister.”
