by Saxon Henry

Created on: February 28, 2009   Last Updated: March 06, 2009

Though Miami Modern, or MiMo, has become a popular moniker for an architectural style, the curators of an exhibition Promises of Paradise: Staging Mid-Century Miami on view at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach in late 2007/early 2008, found that there is so much more to this name than meets the eye. A book, Miami Modern Metropolis: Paradise and Paradox in Midcentury Architecture and Planning, edited by Allan T. Shulman, will be available through

Balcony Press in May 2009.

"The meaning of Miami's mid-century buildings goes beyond the faade," remarks Thomas Hine, the exhibition's Guest Curator of Design, Decorative Arts and Popular Culture. "It's also the Cadillac that sweeps up to the building, the woman in gloves and a mink collar who gets out of the Cadillac, and the fanciful environment she walks through."

Hine collaborated with Shulman, who was the Guest Curator of Architecture and Urban Planning; and Ruth Grim, the Curator of Collections at the Bass, examining MiMo's explosion from 1945 to 1965. Furniture designed by Morris Lapidus, bequeathed to the museum by the architect, was the exhibition's nucleus. Along with Lapidus Alfred Browning Parker, George Farkas, Frederick Rank, Igor Polevitsky, Rufus Nims, Kay Pancoast and Fran Williams were stars of the show.

"How is Morris Lapidus modern?" queries Hine. "That's a complicated question because the exteriors of his buildings are certainly shaped by European Modernism, Oscar Niemeyer and South American responses to European Modernism, but there is a fantastic element to his interiorsthe stairway to nowhere and the dreamlike quality of his environmentsthat definitely puts him in the Fantasy Modernism category."

What fascinates Shulman is the undercurrent rippling beneath the perspectives of the progenitors of MiMo's "Flabergast" hotels. "In spite of that general image, there was another trend occurring that sought to develop a tropical architecture and to find some basis of authenticity in the Florida lifestyle," he explains. "Modernism is often viewed as a polemical style, but in Miami, it had been de-radicalized, de-polemicized, regionalized and popularized. It's difficult to imagine another place in America where Modernism was the De facto style of almost everything that was happening."

Grim celebrates that MiMo's biggest players will finally be recognized. "We rescued the work of some people who were so close to being forgotten," Grim remarks. "In some cases, we got there just in the nick of time."

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