Lapidus and Swedroe.
Morris Lapidus, the architect of the Fontainebleau and Lincoln Road, and Robert M. Swedroe, his senior designer and a collage artist.
- Artists
- Morris Lapidus, Robert M. Swedroe
- At
- BitBasel Miami 2026, December 2 to 5
- Venue
- The Sagamore South Beach
- Follow
- @swedroeart
About the work
Designed for Lapidus by day. Collage by night.
Before Robert M. Swedroe made collages at night, he spent about twelve years as Senior Designer for Morris Lapidus, the architect of the Fontainebleau and the Eden Roc. Born in Odessa in 1902 and raised in New York, Lapidus came to architecture through storefront and retail design, and brought its sense of theater to Miami Beach.
Swedroe's first one-man show opened in 1963, the first of eight in a row from Miami Beach to New York, and more than 500 of his collages sold by 1973. That year he started his own architecture firm, and after 33 years away from collage he came back to it.
The master
Morris Lapidus.
Architect of the Fontainebleau and the Eden Roc. Robert M. Swedroe was his Senior Designer for about twelve years.
Miami Beach, 1960
Lincoln Road.
In 1960 Lapidus closed eight blocks of Lincoln Road to cars and turned them into a promenade of black and white paving, fountains, tropical planters and thin concrete shelters, lit like a stage. It opened in November 1960, the first pedestrian mall in Florida.
Ocho Rios, Jamaica, 1957
The Arawak.
In Jamaica, Lapidus designed the Arawak Hotel in Ocho Rios, which opened in 1957, its rooms angled toward the sea around a banyan tree. The site is today's Sandals Dunn's River, which keeps a Lapidus Lounge in an original Arawak building. A thread to Jamaica Basel, Saturday, December 5.
From the archive
The senior designer
The collages.
The artist
Robert M. Swedroe.
Robert M. Swedroe is an architect and a collage artist. For about twelve years he was Senior Designer for Morris Lapidus, and in the evenings he made collages. He studied architecture at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and at Yale, where he earned his master's degree in 1960 and received the Eero Saarinen Award for Excellence in Design. He has made an 8 ft by 10 ft collage installation for The Sagamore. He works from his studio on the Isle of Biscaya.
Visit
See it in Miami Beach.
December 2 to 5 at The Sagamore South Beach.
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