Dave Hickey interviewed Morris Lapidus shortly before the architect’s death at age 99. The excerpt below is from Dave’s central essay in Lapidus/Fontainebleau and draws in part from that interview:

The bright theater of public commerce that terrified and entranced Walter Benjamin in his notes on the Paris arcades and that angered and dismayed John Ruskin in The Stones of Venice, beguiled Morris Lapidus from his first visit to Coney Island. Not surprisingly, then, when I asked Lapidus what he was proudest of in his career, he cited his transgressions—all the elements of twentieth-centu¬ry building that “modern architecture” failed to exploit or to account for. “Well, I made curves work,” Lapidus said, “I even made ‘S’ curves work, which is not easy. I made colors work. I made artificial light, plateglass façades, and ornament work as well. I proved that architecture is still an expressive medium, like music, that it can make people happy.”

The curve, he said, was the key, and the curve of Fontainebleau was his favorite. “Here’s why,” he said. “Back in the ’20s and ’30s, when I was designing stores, I lived on the road. I would come into town on a train, dead tired, and go to a local hotel. I would go up in the elevator, step out and look down this dark, endless hall, under this endless yellow line of twenty-watt bulbs. My knees would almost buckle, so when I finally got to design a hotel, I thought of curving the whole thing. The hall would still be long, of course, but it wouldn’t seem so long because of the curve, because you couldn’t see the ends of it. This also expresses another principle of mine. I let the inside determine the outside, because I’m designing buildings for the people in them, not as objects to be appreciated from traffic helicopters.”

Lapidus went on to unpack the virtues of the curve at some length. Curves, he said, signify leisure, because a curve is the longest, most beautiful distance be¬tween two points and we’re not in a hurry. Curves are sexy because human beings are curved and the curvier the sexier. Curves stand for change because curves are how we measure change and express it. Curves signify flexibility and adaptability to nature, because nature isn’t rectangular. Curves also stand for self-sufficiency and independence, because curved walls can stand free and straight walls cannot.

“A lot of good things about a curve,” Lapidus said, “and about ovals and circles and those biomorphic shapes I call ‘woggles,’ too, because they don’t have any norma¬tive ‘size’ relative to the rectangular enclosure. They can be as big or as small as you wish and they don’t have any particular vantage point. They look okay from every direction and they invite you to check them out.”

When I asked Lapidus about my favorite effect of his: the column disappearing into the lighted “cheese hole,” he explained that when you’re designing stores in New York there is always a building over the store, tons of steel and masonry. The columns have to be there, holding up the building and reminding you of all that weight. The same holds true in large hotels, but if you run the column into a lighted hole the weight disappears. The whole place seems lighter. Lighted cheese holes without the column do the same thing, like the oculus in the Pantheon, only the cheese holes are non-directional. The opposite of the column running into the lighted cheese hole, he explained, was the “beanpole” he invented to punctu¬ate spaces, a five-to-seven-inch round pole running from the floor to the ceiling that is obviously incapable of supporting anything. Even so, it makes the space look lighter. “In any other culture,” Lapidus remarked, “these would be cited as examples of architectural wit that do their job. They would be regarded as amus¬ing design anecdotes, like Palladio painting brick-shapes on plaster. In our culture, they are cited as heresy.”