Addison Cairns Mizner ( ) (December 12, 1872 – February 5, 1933) 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 (briefly) 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 (1898–99) (Canada, not Alaska). 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.Wilson, Scott. Resting Places: The Burial Sites of More Than 14,000 Famous Persons, 3d ed.: 2 (Kindle Location 32847). McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. Kindle Edition.
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".Seebohm 2001. p. 38 His father Lansing Mizner spoke fluent Spanish,Seebohm 2001. pp. 13, 33. as did his paternal step-grandfather, James Semple, also a U.S. diplomat in Spanish America. Addison, who became fluent,Seebohm 2001. p. 183. 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,Seebohm 2001. pp. 36–39 before returning to California in 1890 to study at the Bates School, a boarding school in San Rafael, California.Seebohm 2001. pp. 39, 45–46. His studies there ended in 1891 because of his brother Wilson's expulsion for misbehavior.Seebohm 2001. p. 46 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 (presently the University of California, Berkeley). Either he never presented himself for the examination,Seebohm 2001. pp. 47–48 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",Seebohm 2001. p. 157 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.Seebohm 2001. p. 161 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 (discussed below), 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. (What Mizner's commissioned painting on the cover of his first (1925) 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 ("Mouth of Fire") than Mangue "mangrove".) Streets east of the future Seaboard Coast Line Railroad line (where an "Addison Station" was to be constructed) 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 (, for Alicante), Burgos, Palencia, Lucena, the palace/monastery Escorial, and even small towns: Monreal (name of several towns), Munera. In the planned Spanish Village neighborhood ("Mizner Plat 11"), 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 (San Francisco: Paul Elder). 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 1903Mizner 1932. p. 186.The New York Times. January 10, 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 Quite New Cynic's Calendar of Revised Wisdom for 1908 The Perfectly Good Cynic's Calendar (1908) The Complete Cynic (1910) The Revived Cynic's Calendar (1917)
This produced such sayings as: "A woman's mind is cleaner than a man's. She changes it more often" and "Many are called but few get up".
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 (n.b.) 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 (:es: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.Seebohm 2001. p. 63.
Much later, Addison said several timesOrr 1977. p. 13 n. 5 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 (and Salamanca's isolation makes it an unlikely choice for a foreign student). The only cities in Spain that it is documented that he visited are Seville, Granada, Toledo, and Burgos.