The year was 1953 and Miami's architectural jesus, Morris Lapidus was still a year away from completing his first complete hotel, a structure that would also prove to be his most renowned work, the Fontainebleau. Lapidus had already made quite a name for himself in retail architecture in New York, and then as a 'hotel doctor' in Miami, jazzing up other architects' designs and mastering the art of hotel architecture as spectacle and entertainment. He was Miami's hottest hotel architect and had yet to design an entire hotel. This was when the Algiers Hotel opened in Miami Beach, a building whose bones may have been designed by someone else but whose soul was pure Lapidus. It's long gone now, but lives on in the archives of the Library of Congress' Gotscho-Schleisner Collection, where (thanks to Curbed National) these fabulous photos were dug up.
· Tour the 153 Interiors of Miami's Defunct Algiers Hotel [Curbed National]