PLYMOUTH HOTEL ARCHITECTURE: ANTON SKISLEWICZ AND THE TOWER THAT LOOKED LIKE TOMORROW

The Plymouth Hotel at 336 21st Street, Miami Beach, is one of the most distinctive buildings in the South Beach Art Deco District — a four-storey Streamline Moderne hotel designed by Anton Skislewicz and completed in 1940, whose corner entrance pylon is among the most dramatic vertical gestures in the entire district. Rising above the roofline like a rocket, or the tower of an ocean liner, or some fusion of the two, it was designed to announce the building from a distance and has been doing so for more than eighty years.

The pylon was inspired directly by the 1939 New York World's Fair — the "World of Tomorrow" exhibition whose towers and pylons had introduced a generation of Americans to the visual language of technological optimism. That a Miami Beach hotel should take its cues from a World's Fair is not surprising: the Art Deco buildings of South Beach were, above all, expressions of a specific cultural moment, built by and for people who believed that modernity was not just a style but a promise.

Skislewicz's particular claim on the Plymouth is a biography unlike any other architect in the district: born in Croatia, trained as a naval architect in Vienna and Oslo, a designer of ship engines in Brooklyn, and a graduate of Columbia University's architecture school — a man whose entire engineering background flowed directly into the streamlined maritime forms of his buildings. The Plymouth's pylon is not decorative flourish. It is the work of someone who understood, from first principles, what structural boldness and geometric confidence could achieve.

The Plymouth sits in the Collins Park neighbourhood — quieter and more culturally concentrated than Ocean Drive, facing the Bass Museum of Art and positioned at the heart of what has become Miami Beach's most significant museum district. It is part of the Miami Beach Art Deco Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. After serving as a GI barracks during World War II and a musicians' dormitory for the New World Symphony for a generation, it was restored and reopened as a boutique hotel in 2017, its oval lobby murals by Russian artist Ramon Chatov uncovered and restored to prominence.

  • Written by Gavin Paisley, director & model-maker at Chisel & Mouse based in East Sussex, England.
  • Last updated: 7th April 2026.

Image by James J Gillick & Co., in the public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Plymouth Hotel facade architectural scale model

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What is the Plymouth Hotel?

The Plymouth Hotel is a four-storey Art Deco boutique hotel on 21st Street in the Collins Park neighbourhood of South Beach, Miami Beach, Florida, completed in 1940 and currently operating as a 110-room hotel. It stands on a corner site — the corner position was important to Skislewicz's design, allowing the entrance pylon to read as a three-dimensional object in space rather than a flat façade element — and faces the Bass Museum of Art directly across the street.

The building was one of the last major Art Deco hotels built in Miami Beach before the Second World War interrupted the building boom. It is contemporary with L. Murray Dixon's most productive year (1939, when he completed the Tiffany, Tudor, and Senator), with Henry Hohauser's Cardozo and Century Hotels, and with Skislewicz's own Breakwater Hotel on Ocean Drive. The Plymouth was, in the words of the Miami Design Preservation League, something that "nothing looked like" when it opened — a building that pushed the formal vocabulary of Tropical Deco towards a harder, more overtly futuristic edge than most of its neighbours.

Facts panel

Four-storey Streamline Moderne hotel at 336 21st Street, Collins Park neighbourhood, South Beach, Miami Beach, Florida. Designed 1939–40, completed 1940.

  • Architect: Anton Skislewicz (1895–c.1970)
  • Completed: 1940
  • Address: 336 21st Street, South Beach, Miami Beach, Florida 33139
  • Neighbourhood: Collins Park, South Beach
  • Architectural style: Streamline Moderne / Tropical Deco
  • Floors: Four storeys
  • Rooms: 110 (current)
  • Key architectural features: Corner entrance pylon tower inspired by the 1939 New York World's Fair; window eyebrows; narrow vertical slits and horizontal bands in the façade; oval lobby with white Carrara marble tile floor; twin murals by Ramon Chatov
  • Design inspiration: "World of Tomorrow" exhibition, 1939 New York World's Fair
  • Part of: Miami Beach Art Deco Historic District (National Register of Historic Places, listed 14 May 1979)
  • World War II: Building used to house GIs — part of the mass military occupation of Miami Beach hotels from 1942 onwards
  • New World Symphony: Building served as dormitory for young musicians, 1987 to approximately 2013
  • Renovation: Extensive restoration and reopening by Think Hospitality Group, January 2017; interior design by Fernando Santangelo
  • Murals: Twin lobby murals by Ramon Chatov, discovered and professionally restored during 2010 restoration
  • Awards: Condé Nast Best Urban Hotel (2019)
  • Pool: 1940s Art Moderne pool area, ranked among top 15 most impressive pools in Miami by the New York Times
  • Current use: 110-room boutique hotel; Blue Ribbon Sushi Bar & Grill (ground floor)

Architect: Anton Skislewicz

Anton Skislewicz (1895–c.1970) had the most unusual biography of any architect working in the South Beach Art Deco District — and the most directly relevant one. Born in Croatia in 1895, he grew up in Vienna after his family emigrated, and in 1922 graduated from the University of Vienna with a degree in Mechanical Engineering, specialising in naval architecture and the design of ship engines. He then worked in Oslo for Norway's leading shipbuilders.

At 28, he boarded a steamship in Sweden and sailed alone to the United States. His first American work was in Brooklyn, for the Lidgerwood Manufacturing Company, designing ship capstans and winches. He subsequently worked with architectural firms from 1924 to 1928, planning hospitals and churches, before earning his Bachelor of Architecture with honours from Columbia University. By 1931 he had moved to Miami; by 1934 he was a registered architect in Florida.

The connection between this biography and the buildings he produced in South Beach is direct and consequential. Skislewicz had spent years thinking about the structural logic of ships — their streamlined forms, their towers and funnels, the way mass and function could be resolved into something that was simultaneously efficient and visually powerful. When he came to design the Breakwater Hotel (1939) and the Plymouth Hotel (1940), he was not applying a fashionable aesthetic to resort buildings. He was drawing on a deep professional understanding of how streamlined form works, and why.

His principal buildings in Miami Beach include the Breakwater Hotel (1939, 940 Ocean Drive), the Plymouth Hotel (1940), the Kenmore Hotel (1936), the Ocean Surf (1940), and the Lord Balfour Hotel (1940). His archive is held at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach — directly across the street from the Plymouth he designed.

When war came in 1942, work dried up and the Skislewicz family moved to Washington DC to support the war effort. After the war, he resumed his career in Houston and later in Miami, designing large commercial buildings and shopping malls, until his retirement around 1965. His South Beach buildings from the late 1930s and early 1940s remain by far his most architecturally significant work.

Architectural character: the pylon and the promise of tomorrow

The Plymouth's exterior is organised around a fundamental tension between horizontal and vertical — and between the restraint of the flat façade surfaces and the drama of the entrance pylon.

The pylon is the building's defining element: a tall, narrow tower rising from the corner entrance above the main roofline, its geometric form making it simultaneously a functional elevator shaft and a pure piece of architectural theatre. Its inspiration was explicit and documented: the towers and pylons of the 1939 New York World's Fair, whose "World of Tomorrow" theme had presented visitors with a vision of the future in which streamlined architecture expressed technological progress as pure visual optimism. Skislewicz took that imagery — which millions of Americans had encountered at Flushing Meadows in 1939 — and set it on a corner in Miami Beach.

The façade is characterised by narrow vertical slits — thin elongated window openings that read as speed lines drawn vertically across the surface — and horizontal banding at each floor level that gives the composition its layering and depth. Window eyebrows project above the standard windows in the characteristic Tropical Deco manner, shading the glass and creating shadow patterns across the surface. The overall effect is of a façade in tension between competing formal imperatives: the horizontal emphasis of the banding against the vertical of the slits and the pylon; the smooth rendered surfaces against the projecting shelves; the restrained body of the building against the theatrical boldness of the entrance tower.

The corner site allows the pylon to be read from two directions simultaneously — from 21st Street and from Collins Avenue — so that the building announces itself as you approach from either axis. This three-dimensional reading of the tower is essential to its effect: it is not a flat decorative element applied to a façade but a genuine architectural form occupying space, casting shadow, and communicating ambition from every angle.

The interior: the oval lobby and Chatov's murals

If the exterior's defining element is the pylon, the interior's is the oval lobby — an unusual and generous spatial form that Skislewicz used to create a sequence of entry and threshold unlike the more conventional rectangular lobbies of most South Beach hotels.

The floor is white Carrara marble tile, a material of considerable luxury for a resort hotel of this scale and budget, which gives the lobby its particular quality of cool luminosity in the Florida heat. The oval plan — its shape echoed, according to some accounts, in the pool area — creates a room that is simultaneously expansive and intimate, without corners, the eye carried around the perimeter in a continuous sweep.

The lobby's most remarkable surviving elements are the two murals by Ramon Chatov — discovered behind layers of renovation during the 2010 restoration and professionally restored for the 2017 reopening. Chatov was a Russian-born artist who, according to Think Hospitality's account, lived in military barracks in Miami during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. His murals — jewel-toned in blues, reds, and greens — survived decades of neglect and successive renovations, hidden beneath later finishes. Their discovery and restoration gave the redesigned hotel its palette: interior designer Fernando Santangelo drew directly on Chatov's colours for the renewed scheme, creating a visual continuity between the 1940 building and its 2017 incarnation.

Santangelo described the result as "definitely tropical, but more South of France than South Florida" — a characterisation that captures the hotel's particular register: not the exuberant neon-and-pastel palette of Ocean Drive but something more restrained, more private, more European in its sensibility.

Photograph by P. Hughes, licensed under CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Three lives of the Plymouth Hotel

The GI barracks (1942–45)

When the United States entered World War II in December 1941, the federal government took over virtually the entire hotel stock of Miami Beach for military use. South Beach's hotels became barracks, officers' quarters, hospitals, and training facilities for the hundreds of thousands of servicemen who passed through Florida. The Plymouth was among those requisitioned, housing GIs for the duration of the war. This period — in which Miami Beach's grand leisure buildings were stripped of their civilian function and repurposed for military utility — is one of the more remarkable episodes in the district's history, and one that the buildings' subsequent preservation made possible to recover from.

The New World Symphony dormitory (1987–c.2013)

In 1987, the New World Symphony — Michael Tilson Thomas's training orchestra for exceptional young musicians, founded in Miami Beach that year — acquired the Plymouth as housing for its fellows. For more than two decades, the building that had been designed as a pleasure palace and pressed into military service served as a musicians' dormitory, its Art Deco lobby and oval corridors filled with the sound of practice and rehearsal. This chapter of the Plymouth's life is among the more unexpected in any building's history; the building was, in a very real sense, a conservatory housed in a hotel.

The boutique hotel (2017–present)

Think Hospitality Group's restoration and reopening in January 2017 was the Plymouth's most comprehensive reinvention. The exterior was left substantially untouched — the pylon, the eyebrows, the banding, the oval lobby geometry all preserved — while the interior was reimagined around the Chatov murals and Santangelo's jewel-toned palette. The 110 rooms were furnished by Restoration Hardware; the pool area was restored to its original 1940s Art Moderne character; Blue Ribbon Sushi Bar & Grill was installed in the ground floor.

The hotel won the Condé Nast Best Urban Hotel award in 2019 and has established itself as one of the quietly distinguished addresses in Miami Beach — less famous than Ocean Drive's front-row hotels, more architecturally intact than many of them, and located in the Collins Park cultural district that has emerged as one of the city's most interesting neighbourhoods for art, music, and architecture.

The Collins Park context

The Plymouth's location in Collins Park gives it a different character from the Century Hotel on Ocean Drive or the Marlin on the mid-section of Collins Avenue. Collins Park is a cultural district anchored by the Bass Museum of Art — directly across 21st Street from the Plymouth, close enough that guests can walk to openings — and by the venues associated with Art Basel Miami Beach, which takes over this neighbourhood each December. The Miami City Ballet and the Miami Beach Regional Library are nearby.

This cultural concentration makes Collins Park one of the more architecturally and intellectually interesting addresses in Miami Beach, and gives the Plymouth a context that its Ocean Drive contemporaries — surrounded primarily by bars, restaurants, and tourist activity — do not share. The building was designed for an era when South Beach was a middle-class resort; it has found, in the Collins Park of the 21st century, a context that suits its particular combination of formal ambition and understated good manners.

For other Chisel & Mouse models in the same Art Deco District, see our guides to the Century Hotel and the Marlin Hotel.

Photograph by Luise and Nic of the Miami art deco district, licensed under the Unsplash licence via Unsplash.

The model-maker's lens

We modelled the 21st Street entrance façade — the corner composition with the pylon — because it is the building's defining architectural statement.

  • Focus — the entrance pylon in its full height above the roofline, the corner composition, and the vertical slits and horizontal banding that organise the façade around it
  • Detail — the geometry of the pylon itself; the narrow vertical slit windows and how they contrast with the broader horizontal banding; the projecting window eyebrows creating shadow across the surface
  • How it reads at small scale — very well, because the architecture is fundamentally about geometric form and the contrast between vertical and horizontal elements — both of which read clearly at any scale; the pylon gives the model an immediately legible focal point and a strong vertical silhouette
  • How to display — best viewed from a slight angle at the corner, where the three-dimensional quality of the pylon is most apparent and the building reads as the corner composition it was designed to be; straight on to the main façade shows the banding and vertical slits most clearly

The Plymouth was built in 1940 as a vision of tomorrow — a building that looked like the future at the moment when the future still looked optimistic. At model scale, that forward-looking confidence comes through in the most direct way: the pylon stands above everything around it, just as it did on 21st Street eighty-five years ago.

Frequently asked questions about the Plymouth Hotel, Miami Beach

Who designed the Plymouth Hotel?

Anton Skislewicz (1895–c.1970), a Croatian-born architect who trained as a naval engineer in Vienna and Oslo before earning his architecture degree at Columbia University. He is also responsible for the Breakwater Hotel (1939) on Ocean Drive and several other South Beach buildings.

When was the Plymouth Hotel built?

The Plymouth Hotel was designed in 1939–40 and completed in 1940, during the final phase of South Beach's Art Deco building boom before World War II.

What inspired the entrance pylon on the Plymouth Hotel?

The 1939 New York World's Fair — specifically its "World of Tomorrow" exhibition, whose towers and pylons introduced millions of Americans to the visual language of technological optimism. Skislewicz incorporated this imagery directly into the building's corner entrance tower.

What happened to the Plymouth Hotel during World War II?

Like most Miami Beach hotels, it was requisitioned by the US federal government and used to house GIs. The mass military occupation of South Beach's hotels from 1942 onwards affected virtually every building in the district.

What is the connection between the Plymouth Hotel and the New World Symphony?

In 1987, the New World Symphony — Michael Tilson Thomas's training orchestra, founded in Miami Beach — acquired the Plymouth as a dormitory for its young musicians. The building served this role for more than two decades.

What are the Chatov murals in the Plymouth Hotel?

Twin lobby murals by Ramon Chatov, a Russian-born artist who lived in Miami during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The murals were hidden beneath later renovations and discovered during the 2010 restoration. They were professionally restored and now anchor the lobby's colour scheme — jewel tones of blues, reds, and greens that inspired the hotel's 2017 interior redesign by Fernando Santangelo.

Where is the Plymouth Hotel?

336 21st Street in the Collins Park neighbourhood of South Beach, Miami Beach — facing the Bass Museum of Art, in the heart of Miami Beach's museum district, and close to the annual Art Basel Miami Beach venues.

Is the Plymouth Hotel still operating?

Yes. It operates as a 110-room boutique hotel, reopened by Think Hospitality Group in January 2017. The ground-floor restaurant is Blue Ribbon Sushi Bar & Grill.

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