On Tuesday, April 25, 2023, Deborah Desilets spoke at the Jewish Museum of Florida for the 16th World Congress on Art Deco lecture series.
In her lecture, Desilets shares a documentary on Carl Fisher’s journey in creating the city of Miami Beach. The city grew exponentially from the years 1920 to 1925, with this boom being abruptly halted by the 1926 hurricane.
One of Fisher’s earliest developments was the commercial area that is now known as Lincoln Road. Fisher held a real estate office in the area and it quickly became the place to be in Miami Beach.
After a decline in its popularity, in the 1950s architect Morris Lapidus, who had previously worked on the Fontainebleau and Eden Roc hotels, was asked to help revive the shopping street in his signature MiMo style. The now more pedestrian-friendly shopping mall reopened in 1960, adorned by trees and fountains.
Deborah Desilets, an architect, fashion designer, artist, and author, was Morris Lapidus’s last collaborator. She first met Lapidus when she was marketing director for the Miami-based firm Arquitectonica, after founding their computer lab in 1988.
Soon afterward Desilets left to create her own firm where she redesigned warehouse districts into Clubs for Miami and Miami Beach, and worked as an extra in 7 Miami films before she began to work with Lapidus on a number of design projects that explored each of his illustrious careers’ building types.
Desilets has lectured extensively Nationally and Internationally on Lapidus’s work. As a working mother of three sons, she broke many glass ceilings and progressively and bravely strove for her place in the conversation of architecture.
Desilets arranged the late lectures of Morris Lapidus for Yale University, Harvard, and Columbia. Desilets also delivered lectures for Lapidus at Austin Texas with Bill Scofield, Tom Ford, Stanley Marcus, and Todd Oldham; Pressing Style. A very successful reappraisal and rehabilitation of Lapidus’s architectural oeuvre was achieved with these lectures.
Desilets continues to lecture to students at the Design and Architecture Senior High School where in 1993 she taught computer-aided design after building the computer lab there through extensive and generous grants with $18K in donated equipment and programs.
The 16th World Congress on Art Deco was made possible with the support of the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau, the City of Miami Beach, Miami-Dade County, the State of Florida, the International Coalition of Art Deco Societies, and the Art Deco Society of the Palm Beaches.
