It’s hard to imagine now, but the architecture in South Florida wasn’t always Spanish Colonial, at least until Addison Mizner came along in 1918. The well-connected son of the ambassador to Guatemala, Mizner moved to Palm Beach for health reasons and soon fell in with an exclusive social set that included the heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune, acclaimed dancer Isadora Duncan, and champion boxer Kid McCoy. El Solano, Mizner’s personal residence, was bought in 1980 by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, just months before Lennon’s assassination. Though Mizner never actually trained as an architect, he designed over forty buildings and developed the exclusive town of Boca Raton. (He was also, ahem, an eccentric and flamboyant bachelor.) Architect Stephen Perkins and cultural historian James Caughman co-wrote the recent biography Addison Mizner: The Architect Whose Genius Defined Palm Beach, and they’ll be discussing the man and his work.
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