Addison Mizner
Addison Cairns Mizner was an American architect whose Mediterranean Revival and Spanish Colonial Revival style interpretations changed the character of southern Florida, where the style is continued by architects and land developers. Palm Beach, Florida, which he "transformed", was his home, and most of his houses are there. He believed that architecture should also include interior and garden design, and initiated the company Mizner Industries to have a reliable source of components. He was "an architect with a philosophy and a dream". Boca Raton, Florida, an unincorporated small farming town that was established in 1896, became the site of Mizner's most famous development project.
The, bon vivant epitomized the "society architect". Rejecting other modern architects for "producing a characterless copybook effect", he sought to "make a building look traditional and as though it had fought its way from a small, unimportant structure to a great, rambling house that took centuries of different needs and ups and downs of wealth to accomplish. I sometimes start a house with a Romanesque corner, pretend that it has fallen into disrepair and been added to in the Gothic spirit, when suddenly the great wealth of the New World has poured in and the owner had added a very rich Renaissance addition." Or as he described his own never-built castle, drawings of which were part of his promotional literature, it would be "a Spanish fortress of the twelfth century captured from its owner by a stronger enemy who, after taking it, adds on one wing and another, and then loses it in turn to another who builds to suit his taste". As these quotes suggest, many Mizner buildings contain styles from more than one period, but all foreign.
Biography
Born in Benicia, at the time "the educational center of California", and its state capital, he traveled as a child with his father, Lansing B. Mizner, a lawyer, former President of the California Senate and the U. S. Minister to Central America, based in Guatemala. Brigadier John Kemp Mizner was Addison Mizner's first cousin once removed.As a young man, he visited China in 1893, was briefly a gold miner in the Yukon . Of his seven siblings, six of them boys, he was closest to his younger brother Wilson, though his disreputable behavior caused Addison many problems. He had a macaw parrot. and kept as pets a series of monkeys, which often rode on his shoulder; his favorite had a headstone at his grave, identifying him as "Johnnie Brown, The Human Monkey, Died April 30, 1927".
In 1932 Mizner published The Many Mizners, an autobiography covering his youth, year mining, and time in New York until the death of his mother. A second volume telling of his life in Florida was begun but never completed; the Palm Beach Historical Society has the typed manuscript. Mizner died in 1933 of heart failure in Palm Beach and is buried in the family vault at Cypress Lawn Memorial Park.
According to Donald Curl, author of Mizner's Florida,
He was just completely outgoing and basically a really good guy. One of the things he was noted for was the kindness toward the people who worked for him and the courtesy he showed them. Some of the other architects of this era were almost the reverse; they saw the other architects as their employees, and they should have nothing to do with the design other than putting it on paper. Mizner was not that way. When the bust began in Florida, he actually helped some of the young architects get established elsewhere.
The vast majority of Mizner's employees developed an affection for and allegiance to him: "It was a pleasure working for Mizner", one remarked.
Mizner's Hispanism
Addison accompanied his father when the latter travelled to Guatemala in August 1889 to begin his duties there. His first stop, aged 15, on the boat to Guatemala was Mazatlán, Mexico. This was Addison's first direct contact with the Hispanic world, which he described as "the greatest day of my life". His father Lansing Mizner spoke fluent Spanish, as did his paternal step-grandfather, James Semple, also a U.S. diplomat in Spanish America. Addison, who became fluent, after some tutoring enrolled at the Instituto Nacional in Guatemala City, "where we learned that boys fought with knives and not with fists". He remained there for a year, visiting Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Honduras with his father, before returning to California in 1890 to study at the Bates School, a boarding school in San Rafael, California. His studies there ended in 1891 because of his brother Wilson's expulsion for misbehavior. He continued his studies briefly at Boone's College in Berkeley, California, with the hope of passing the entrance examination for the University of California. Either he never presented himself for the examination, or he failed it. In any event, that was the end of his formal education.In his own words:
I have based my design largely on the old architecture of Spain — with important modifications and to meet Florida conditions. I studied the architecture of Spain itself and drew somewhat on my knowledge of Spanish tropical America.
In one of his advertisements:
Spanish Art in Boca Raton homes adds a special charm to these dwellings, in a land of tropical beauty where the softness of the South makes life easy.
He also assembled an excellent library on Spanish and Spanish Colonial architecture, which has survived and is now administered by the Historical Society of Palm Beach County.
The first idea of Mizner about his first Florida building, now the Everglades Club, was that it should contain "a Moorish tower", a clear reference to the Alhambra, which Mizner visited and commented on. The Mediterranean Revival style Mizner introduced to South Florida was not Turkish or Italian, it was Spanish, specifically of the hottest, southern part of Spain, Andalucía; colonial Guatemala had similar architecture. He taught workmen to make Spanish red roof tiles, appropriate for the climate. A scholar states that Mizner's mature style was "founded upon the architecture of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Spain", although the Alhambra is older and Guatemala was primarily the workmanlike eighteenth- and nineteenth-century architecture of the south of Spain. Like a colonial Spanish architect would have, in many cases he worked without paper plans.
Many of Mizner's projects have Spanish names: El Mirasol, El Solano, La Ronda, and others. In his never-realized plan for Boca Raton, between the present Palmetto Park Road and Hillsboro Boulevard, the main street, El Camino Real, has a Spanish name, though, in another of his fanciful stories, he claimed it was inspired by Rio de Janeiro's Botafogo neighborhood. brochure does resemble in Rio de Janeiro, is the :pt:Canal do Mangue, which runs down the middle of a wide street, but is nowhere near Botafogo, which he may have mentioned because it seemed like a more elegant name Streets east of the future Seaboard Coast Line Railroad line had Spanish personal names: Ponce de Leon, Gonzalo, Juan, Isabel, Hernando, as well as Montazuma, and Noche Triste. To the west they were to have the names of small Spanish cities: Tarragona, Cordoba, Toledo, Alcante, Burgos, Palencia, Lucena, the palace/monastery Escorial, and even small towns: Monreal, Munera. In the planned Spanish Village neighborhood, projected streets had Spanish names: the main Alvarado Road, and crossing it, fanciful names, not all of which are visible in the photograph: Ébano, Feraz, Grúa, Haz, Ídolo, Jasmine, Kay, Labio, Malvis, Nao, Orear, Prado, Quevedo, Rocinante, and Salerno. The different types of pottery produced by Mizner Industries each had the name of a Spanish city.
Mizner the humorist
In 1903 Mizner provided illustrations for The Limerick Up to Date Book of Ethel Watts Mumford. It says something about Mizner that he would illustrate this poem:In 1902, with Oliver Herford and Ethel Watts Mumford, he published an annual illustrated The Complete Cynic. Being Bunches of Wisdom Culled from the Calendars of Oliver Herford, Ethel Watts Mumford, Addison Mizner.
- The Cynic's Calendar of Revised Wisdom for 1903
- The Cynic's Calendar of Revised Wisdom for 1904
- The Entirely New Cynic's Calendar of Revised Wisdom for 1905
- The Complete Cynic's Calendar of Revised Wisdom for 1906
- The Altogether New Cynic's Calendar of Revised Wisdom for 1907
- The Perfectly Good Cynic's Calendar
- The Complete Cynic
- The Revived Cynic's Calendar
Mizner the storyteller
Mizner was a storyteller but not a reliable one. He invented stories, all set in foreign countries and thus in practice unverifiable. One the lack of veracity of which is documented is the tale of his visit with his father and other family members to the ruins of Copán, in Honduras. "No one knew exactly where it was", and they needed "a small army of carriers and machete wielders to cut our way in". John Lloyd Stephens was "the only other white man to set foot on the temple steps in three hundred and seventy years". However, at least six other white men visited and wrote about Copán in the 19th century, not counting the expeditions of the Peabody Museum of Harvard University. His well-informed father, the U.S. ambassador, surely knew about some of these visitors. Mizner also omitted embarrassing information: he said his father retired as ambassador because "father's health broke down", when in fact his father was dismissed by Secretary of State James G. Blaine after a diplomatic incident.It was on this journey that he received his first monkey, named Deuteronomy, who drowned, on the return voyage from Nicaragua to Guatemala, after she was hit on the head with a trombone and fell overboard.
As he told it in a totally fictitious tale, he laid out the town of Dawson Creek, British Columbia, with no tape measure. He told a story about how, in 1892, Argelia Benton, the American wife of Guatemalan dictator Jose Maria Reina Barrios, invited him to build a new palace for her in Guatemala City. He was to receive a retainer of $25,000 in gold, but Barrios was assassinated before Mizner received any of the money. Mizner's dramatic story is not evidenced by the chronology: her residence/palace, Villa Argelia, already existed in 1892, and Barrios was assassinated in 1898.
Much later, Addison said several times that he enrolled "at some point during this time" in the University of Salamanca, in Spain, though the only known detail about his studies there, if they existed, is that he did not receive a degree. There is no confirmation that he ever studied there. The only cities in Spain that it is documented that he visited are Seville, Granada, Toledo, and Burgos.
So much as available evidence indicates, he was never in the small city of Salamanca. However, because of its prestigious and mellifluous name, Salamanca was mentioned by Mizner repeatedly.
- According to Mizner, the Spanish king, Alfonso XIII, came to his hotel, insisted on seeing him, and gave him paneling from "the private apartments of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain in Salamanca." There were no such apartments in Salamanca.
- Mizner also said that the entry to the Cloister Inn was through "a large Romanesque arch reminiscent of the entrance gate of the University of Salamanca". There is no Romanesque architecture in Salamanca.
- The Cloister Inn had a "Salamanca Room".
- The huge doors of the Cloister Inn were said to be "three-hundred-year-old originals from the University of Salamanca". In reality, these doors were made of Dade County pine in the workshops of Mizner Industries."
- The ceiling of the house La Bienvenida was "inspired by a cloister ceiling at the library at the University of Salamanca".
A similar Hispanic tale told several times by Mizner is that his administration buildings was based on the house of the Spanish painter El Greco, in Toledo, Spain. As Mizner surely knew, El Greco's house was long vanished, little is known of it, and the house/museum of El Greco in Toledo, recently constructed and opened in Mizner's day, made no pretense to even be in the same location as the original house. Mizner did not follow the somber architectural style of Castile, where Toledo was, and a similarity between the two buildings is difficult to see. Similarly, he invented the connection between the tower of the Cloister Inn, which is vaguely Spanish, with the Giralda tower of the Cathedral of Seville. The San Francisco Ferry Building — a project of his mentor Polk — does have a tower that clearly resembles the Seville tower. Two contemporaneous buildings in south Florida also contain towers based on the Giralda: the Freedom Tower and the Miami Biltmore Hotel, both products of the architectural company Schultze and Weaver, who in 1927 built the Boca Raton Club that Mizner could not.
Similarly, he said that he traveled with his father to San José, Costa Rica, by river, which is impossible: San José is at, and is not even close to a navigable river. He embellished it further by adding that they had missed a steamer and had to travel by dugout canoe; there have never been dugout canoes in Costa Rica. He said that he based a dining hall, with multiple wash stations, on a "hospital" in Vic, Spain; there is no such building in Vic. He also invented a prize fight in Australia; he had a lifelong leg injury and could not possibly box. But he said he fought the boxing champion of Australia to a draw after twenty rounds, and in a rematch knocked out and probably killed his opponent. He had to escape out the back door with his share of the gate, head for the harbor, and board a ship whose gangplank was conveniently just being drawn up. One wonders what to make of his claim that he was "as good a bricklayer as any man I ever had. I can plaster as well as any plasterer I have seen. I am a fairly good carpenter, a better than ordinary electrician. I know how to wipe a joint in plumbing." Similarly, "I had to go into the nursery business and build a tree-moving machine. What fun it was teaching men how to stucco, teaching others how to cure pip in chickens, clearing jungles, killing land crabs, catching alligators. It was all like a game."