In the early 1990's, after his wife, the legendary architect Morris Lapidus found himself staring at a calendar white with blank dates. The designer of Miami Beach's Fontainebleau and Eden Roc hotels, Mr. Lapidus, then in his early 90s, had retired from active practice and sat alone in his ocean-front duplex, bored.
In 1994, after a jury for the work of students of architecture, he had a lunch with fellow juror, Deborah Desilets, lunch and more. ''He was so out of the professional life,''she said. ''I realized that he had so much to give, it would be a shame not to find a way to make it happen.''Finally, they formed an informal partnership to him from deep retirement to shallow retirement. Now, at 97, he is back in business, sketching.
With Ms. Desilets, 41, he has conceived a new hotel for Miami Beach, the financing is not yet, and several stores for Roots, a Canadian clothing chain. Yesterday, their new project, Aura, a restaurant, opened on Lincoln Road in the Art Deco District. Sitting in the immutable apartment he designed here many years ago, Mr. Lapidus said with the groomed voice of a gentleman of the old school,''After I met Deborah, had interesting things again.''
Before he was America's outstanding designer hotel, he was outstanding architect of the country store. It has the shape of the restaurant to entice customers inside. ''I hate the box, so that all my stores have undulating curves and lines,''he said. ''The curves get almost psychedelic.''
The curves sweep people into a bath of red, orange, pink and aqua. Mr. Lapidus has used his signature free-form shapes to light in the entire restaurant, the 1900 square meters and 60 seats. Aura is named after the glow.
He is quick to credit his staff, Ms. Desilets, an architect who develops his preliminary designs. ''Some people keep wondering what this old man doing with this young woman,''he said. ''It makes the work possible. She is an excellent draftsman. The details of architecture do not interest me more. I am on it. They worked me. I want to design, but that's all I want to do.''
With their help, Mr. Lapidus began lectures throughout the country. The lectures in turn led to the first of the new commissions. ''Mr. Lapidus knows how the emotions physical form,''she said. Seine''Raum swirls, it prompts you to move, it's an interactive architecture.''
As in his hotel designs, there is hardly a straight line in the restaurant plan. Many people see only the decoration in Mr. Lapidus's work and are not in a position to the brilliant complexity of the plan. ''Many forms intertwined, one curve moving in and another swinging in the opposite way,''he said. ''The people do not move in straight lines like an army - they meander. So, my plans meander. At the Fontainebleau, I have everything. Normally, an architect would plans, and the curtains would be by someone else. I wanted them all, and I did.''
Aghast at the dripping chandeliers and swag curtains, critics bashed the Fontainebleau and his other hotels. ''The International style had taken over,''he said. He recalls what Serge Chermayeff, a Yale professor and Museum of Modern Art consultant, once said:''You can like Lapidus's work, if you blindly.''
But others are not hasty verdict. ''Philip Johnson said years ago that he would like to wait and see,''said Lapidus. ''If we had lunch about three months in New York, he hugged me and said: "You are the father of us all." It is a very pleasant memory.''
Mr. Lapidus who trained at Columbia when Beaux-Arts decoration was integral part of the curriculum, straddled traditional and Modernist architecture. Wen
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