Book Description
Reprint of rare, handsome volume illustrates more than 30 Florida residences designed by great architect in imaginative adaptations of Spanish Colonial style. Also, such landmark creations as the Everglades Club, Via Parigi, the Singer Building, The Cloister at Boca Raton, the Riverside Baptist Church at Jacksonville, and many more. 185 photographs.
Customer Reviews:
Very resourceful in renovating our Mizner home.......2006-12-11
I noticed the other review and felt it did not do this resourceful book as much justice as it deserves. My husband and I own a house designed by Addison Mizner, where we live half of the year. We had to renovate an entire back portion of our house to bring it back to the original design. During the 1980's a former owner did an odd renovation to a small portion of the house and a substantial addition to the house without respecting the original design. This book provided much insight into the original interiors & architectural details of Mizner's architecture. Two books by Donald Curl: Mizner's Florida: American Resort Architecture, and his other book, Palm Beach County: An Illustrated History were of extreme help and importance in renovating our house. Also, of great help in understanding Mizner's architecture was the large collection of archives available to the general public at the Historical Society of Palm Beach County. Since Mizner supplied furniture to many of his clients it was wonderful to see photographs of many of the interiors in their original glory. When researching Addison Mizner's interiors I found the interior photographs in this book to be the most resourceful photographs of all books or archives that I could find. Also to note of much importance is that there are photographs of homes that have sadly been demolished. Thank God for the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach!
Florida Architecture of Addison Mizner.......2000-06-02
A thoughtful, and general overview of the work of this eclectic and influential resort architect. While the text is well written, the total lack of any siteplans, floorplans, and elevations cause this book to provide only a partial understanding of Mizner's work. All photos are black and white, and while this serves to keep the book modestly priced, it also severely limits the reader's enjoyment. Still, for the cost a worthwhile bargain.
Book Description
This is the first complete biography of the inimitable society architect Addison Mizner, whose Spanish Revival buildings created a new style of resort architecture for Palm Beach and south Florida during the boom years of the 1920s. By 1925, Mizner ranked as one of the country's most prominent architects, as important in his own time as Richard Morris Hunt and Stanford White had been in theirs.
The book's 150 illustrations include plans and historical photographs - many published for the first time - showing Mizner's handling of space, the relation of his houses to the landscape, and the many picturesque buildings that combined the comfort and convenience expected by his clients.
Donald W. Curl is Professor of History at Florida Atlantic University. The Architectural History Foundation American Monograph Series.
Amazon.com
The title of this pleasingly told biography of Mizner--the hulking bon vivant who designed Spanish-style fantasia homes for the Jazz Age elite of South Florida--advances a general misconception about him: though his name is commonly associated with Boca Raton, he actually designed precious little for that town before his sprawlingly grandiose development scheme there caved in, leaving him broke for the short remainder of his life. Rather, the bulk of his work is in Palm Beach, where he designed countless romantic but shrewdly conceived Spanish Revival homes and estates for the old and new rich who flocked to this tropical "last frontier" in the 1920s. Seebohm accordingly focuses most on this output--from the early residence El Mirasol to the latter Playa Riente, not to mention Mizner's elegant Everglades Club and his own Via Mizner, which in a sense was America's first open-air shopping mall. (Photographs weren't available for review, but they will make up two 16-page inserts, unfortunately in black-and-white; Mizner was a master of intoxicating pastels.)
This isn't a rigid, theoretical sort of monograph, but, then again, Mizner wasn't a rigid, theoretical sort of architect--he had no formal training and (critics have noted) he did nothing to advance architectural idiom like the modernists. His genius was the way in which he parlayed a wildly divergent early career (that included travel in Alaska, China and Guatemala) into what became a vast enterprise in which he not only designed homes, interiors, and landscapes of distinct beauty and coherence, but oversaw and trained a virtual army of workers in the art of buying or reproducing Spanish stucco, tile work, pottery, furniture, and more. Adored in both high society and bohemian circles, his friends included everyone from grand dame Eva Stotesbury, for whom he designed El Mirasol, to composer Irving Berlin. He was also wildly flamboyant, uniquely resilient and adept at self-reinvention, and apparently blessed with a heart as big as his waistline. As such, Mizner lived a life as much about all-American pluck and luck in a heady, doomed decade as it was about architectural sensibility. Those two strands are deftly woven together here in a life story that approaches the same tone of genteel fondness that most of Mizner's rich lady friends routinely employed in recommending him to their ever-richer friends. --Timothy Murphy
Book Description
The rollicking tale of the artist, adventurer, and visionary whose innovative architecture transformed Palm Beach and whose dramatic rise and fall mirrors the larger-than-life excesses of the 1920s.
Addison Mizner’s Mediterranean-style mansions—with their stucco walls, tiled roofs, and Moorish accents—are much-admired Florida icons. In
Boca Rococo, renowned author and biographer Caroline Seebohm introduces the flamboyant genius behind these pastel palaces.
Mizner was a leading San Francisco society figure in the 1890s, joined the Alaska Gold Rush, traveled to China, and made his way to an exploding turn-of-the-century New York. No formal training but huge natural talent established him as architect of the rich and famous. The getaways he designed made Palm Beach America’s most elegant resort—and fed his dream of developing a “Venice-on-the-Ocean” in nearby Boca Raton. Mizner’s plans ended with the collapse of Florida’s real estate boom. He died in 1933, broken and bankrupt.
Drawing on a huge cache of untapped materials—including measured plans and an unpublished autobiography—Seebohm restores Mizner to the pantheon of great architects and flamboyant Americans.
Customer Reviews:
A great read..........2007-05-14
I found myself always wanting more of this book. The author has done a great job presenting the life of Addison Mizner. The starting point is interesting. Caroline Seebohm discovered a cache of records from the architect's office. What she failed to mention and may not know is that these records were split sometime after the death of Addison so there is another book to be written!
Book Description
Aimed at absolute beginners, this essential guide provides the technical tricks of the trade—the “building blocks”—needed to portray structures from country churches to city skylines. All it takes is 10 easy and fully illustrated lessons to master linear perspective, proportion, and composition, and to capture the texture of materials such as brick, stone, concrete, wood, glass, and steel. Draw a simple weathered wooden bungalow using graphite pencil. An old-fashioned church, with corner lines that converge at 2 vanishing points and different elevations, makes the perfect subject for illustrating 2-point perspective. Bring color into the picture in an image of a brightly painted Italian fishing cottage. Other demonstrations focus on architectural details, combining tools and techniques, and more.
Book Description
An invaluable A-Z Directory of Ornamental Plants looks at the pruning requirements of wide range of species on a plant by plant basis.
Book Description
Contains over 700 color photographs alongside complementary text coverage of all North American species of birds and classifications that enable the reader to become a master at the art of field identification. Habitat maps. Handy small format, perfect for tucking in a backpack.
Customer Reviews:
Unique learning tool.......2002-11-14
The key to using this book and its companion field guides is to regard it as a learning tool, not as your primary field guide. The book teaches a methodology for identifying birds aimed at people with an analytical thinking style. No book can replace an experienced birder at your side for learning the basics, but no other book teaches you how to systematically observe several bird characteristics as this one does. Yes, Sibley is much better on feather patterns, and the new National Geographic guide is more comprehensive and up-to-date, but these don't teach you how to classify characterisics of bird appearance, behavior, and habitat. Sibley's new Birding Basics covers some of this ground, but not in systematic fashion. Use Farrand's companion field guides to see how his system is applied, then use the more popular guides in the field.
Customer Reviews:
The Yellow Kid-Hully Gee!.......2005-11-24
I have had a long fascination for Richard F.Outcault's seriously strange creation "Mickey Dugan",alias the "Yellow Kid",but only with the publication of this book did I finally see the entire original run of Outcault's cartoons from the New York newspapers.Cited as the first real "comic strip" character,the Kid's initial appearances were in full page color drawings-huge single panels featuring Mickey and his urchin set,denizens of the New York tenements,always engaged in some kind of lively(sometimes illegal)activity-a parody of political meetings,sports,the theater,the doings of freemasons etc.Later Outcault also drew the Kid in the now familiar "strip cartoon" format.The Yellow Kid originally appeared in the sunday comic supplement to Joseph Pulitzer's "New York World" in panels titled "Hogan's Alley".The character soon became a major player in the circulation war between Pulitzer and his brash rival (fresh from California),W.R.Hearst,owner/editor of the "New York Journal",who nabbed Outcault from the "World" just as the Kid was becoming a seriously major craze in 1896(the "World" continued the character by another artist,George Luks).The "Journal" drawings were themselves accompanied by a text story expanding on the cartoon,but often only marginally related to it,and usually rather flatly written-not by Outcault,but most frequently by Edward W.Townsend,creator of the popular tales about Bowery boy man-servant "Chimmie Fadden".
This book under review,was issued originally in 1995,to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Kid's first appearance.It is an invaluable collection,reproducing-for the first time since the 1890s-not only all of Oucault's Kid pages and strips from the "World" and the "Journal",but also a wide selection of his appearances in other parts of the papers in black and white drawings with texts accompanying them(the Kid's diary,adventures abroad,his involvement in the 1898 war with Spain etc).Bill Blackbeard provides an exhaustive detailed commentary on the background to the character,examining his various newspaper appearances and providing a lot of information about the Yellow Kid as an 1890s "celebrity",an advertizing bonanza(Mickey sold everything-he even had his own brand of cigarettes!),stage star,and general all round popular culture phenomenon.The Kid's huge popularity becomes more remarkable when one considers that he only survived as a newspaper cartoon character for about 3 years!My only gripes about Blackbeard's commentaries are that he can sometimes be a little sniffily "pc" in looking back on a very different era,and I would have liked to know more about Outcault the man(but is much known anyway?)-that aside they are excellent,and the book includes a superb bibliography too.The material reproduced so well here is fascinating,especially to anyone who loves the 1890s.In the teeming,chaotic full page cartoons,we dive back into a distant,violent anarchic world-that of the tenement Irish in New York during the "mauve" decade-a place Jacob Riis chronicled in photographs,but here the grimness of that existence is given its own wild,disreputable,but undeniably appealing humor-the slums leering out at us and saying(in their own unique way)-"Say!Life is real-and ain't we somethin'!".
The quality of Outcault's drawing is very high,especially in the "classic" period of 1896/7.Comments from the characters appear everywhere,surrealistically placed on hoardings,on walls and fences and most famously on Mickey Dugan's ochre nightshirt-mostly written in the archaic "hully gee-dis is de main guy" slanguage of 1890's New York icons like Chuck Connors,Steve Brodie and Chimmie Fadden-but Outcault's words transcend their origins-he is a master of clever phrasing when creating the nose thumbing patois of the Yellow Kid's Hogan's Alley and McFadden's Flats.
When he started out,Mickey really was a baby,just a toddler,lurking in some part of the picture-one among many in a recurring cast of tenement dwellers.But gradually he turned into the star,and in the process transformed into a bald,jug eared adolescent,strangely still wearing a baby's nightshirt-grinning knowingly out at the world-the wiseguy who was not only lord in his own slum,at one with its anarchic values and sensibilities,but a sharpee who could transpose them into whichever arena he and his accompanying tenement crowd moved-even when mixing with all manner of foreigners while touring the globe(in the series from 1897 "Round the World with the Yellow Kid").
Richard Outcault soon turned to other comic creations-perhaps the Kid and his pals were basically too disreputable and nihilistic for a man coming to want greater "respectability".Even the Kid's adventures in the "Journal" became tamer,the humor gradually abandoning that savage edge found in cartoons like the violent 1896 "World" panel "What they did to the dog-catcher in Hogan's Alley"-the Kid and his pals became cuter,less dangerous.Outcault's later strip character,the thoroughly middle class "Buster Brown" even eclipsed Mickey Dugan in popularity,and the cartoon lasted far longer than the one about the kid in the yellow nightshirt.Buster's world,his mischief accompanied by little homilies to set everything right,was a far cry from the madcap slum tenements Mickey Dugan and his cohorts sprang from-though the Kid himself did wander inexplicably into "Buster Brown" a few times(reproduced here)-a half remembered phantom from the seemy side of "Boss" Croker's New York.
Books:
- Frank Lloyd Wright's Glass Designs (Wright at a Glance)
- French Touch, The
- Grand Hotels of the Jazz Age: The Architecture of Schultze and Weaver
- Great Camps of the Adirondacks
- Hip Hotels: City, Revised Edition
- Hot Wheels: 35 Years of Speed, Power Performance and Attitude
- How to Plan, Contract and Build Your Own Home
- Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream
- Iconic Building
- Illustrated Dictionary of Building Design and Construction
Books Index
Books Home
Recommended Books
- A Passover Haggadah
- The Control of Nature
- Making Sense of Critical Appraisal
- Optical Properties of Photonic Crystals
- Painting and Decorating Clay Pots: 117 Step-by-Step Projects for Making People, Animals, and Fantasy
- The Amazing Power of Deliberate Intent 4-CD: Part II: Finding the Path to Joy Through Energy Balance
- Suite Francaise
- Spaces of Global Cultures: Architecture, Urbanism, Identity
- Landscapes Estimating & Contract Administration
- A guide to the woody plants of Colorado,
General
| Architecture
| Professional & Technical
| Subjects
| Books
Palm Beach Houses
Palm Beach: An Architectural Legacy
Mediterranean Domestic Architecture for the United States (Twentieth Century Landmarks in Design, Vol. 9) (Acanthus Press Reprint Series. 20th Century, ... 20th Century, Landmarks in Design, V. 9.)
Palm Beach Splendor: The Architecture of Jeffery Smith
Old Florida: Florida's Magnificent Homes, Gardens and Vintage Attractions
