Plymouth Hotel Architectural Model

This architectural object is inspired by the Plymouth Hotel at 336 21st Street, Miami Beach — a four-storey Streamline Moderne hotel designed by Anton Skislewicz and completed in 1940, sitting in the Collins Park neighbourhood of South Beach facing the Bass Museum of Art. With its corner entrance pylon rising above the roofline like a rocket — inspired directly by the towers of the 1939 New York World's Fair — the Plymouth is the most overtly futuristic gesture in the South Beach Art Deco District, and the most architecturally dramatic.

Skislewicz was unlike any other architect working in the district: born in Croatia, trained as a naval architect in Vienna and Oslo, a designer of ship engines in Brooklyn, and a Columbia University architecture graduate. His entire engineering background poured into the streamlined forms of his Miami Beach buildings. The Plymouth's pylon is not decorative flourish. It is the work of someone who understood structural boldness from first principles.

The building is part of the Miami Beach Art Deco Historic District. 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 in 2017, its oval Carrara marble lobby and twin Ramon Chatov murals uncovered and brought back to prominence.

Read the full Plymouth Hotel architecture guide

 

The tower that looked like tomorrow, distilled into form

 

When the Plymouth opened in 1940, nothing in South Beach looked like it. The entrance pylon — a tall geometric tower rising from the corner site above the roofline — was a direct quotation from the 1939 New York World's Fair's "World of Tomorrow" exhibition, whose towers and pylons had just introduced a generation of Americans to the visual language of technological optimism. Skislewicz set that imagery on the corner of 21st Street and Collins Avenue, and it has been announcing itself from two directions simultaneously ever since.

This architectural model focuses on the elements that define the Plymouth's identity:

• the corner entrance pylon in its full height above the roofline — the building's defining element and the most dramatic vertical gesture in the Art Deco District
• the narrow vertical slits and horizontal banding that organise the façade around the tower, creating a tension between vertical and horizontal that gives the building its dynamism
• the projecting window eyebrows casting shadow across the rendered surfaces — the Tropical Deco detail that ties the Plymouth to its South Beach contemporaries
• the corner composition itself, allowing the pylon to read as a three-dimensional form rather than a flat façade element

Reduced to object form, these elements allow the architectural confidence of the Plymouth — a building that announced itself as a vision of the future in 1940 and has never stopped doing so — to be understood with immediate force.

 

Why the Plymouth Hotel works as an architectural model

 

The building translates with particular power into object form because its design is governed by:

• a single dominant element — the pylon — that gives the model an immediately legible focal point and a vertical silhouette unlike anything else in the collection
• the corner composition, which means the object rewards being seen from an angle as much as straight on, the pylon reading as a genuine three-dimensional form
• the contrast between the geometric drama of the tower and the restraint of the flat façade surfaces — a tension that is as clear at model scale as at full scale
• the vertical slits and horizontal banding creating a strong shadow pattern across the surface at any angle of light

At model scale, the Plymouth reads as what it was designed to be: a building that looked like the future, confident in its own ambitions, indifferent to the more modest gestures of its neighbours.

Rather than functioning as a literal miniature, this object captures the architectural character of the Plymouth Hotel.

 

Craft, materials, and finish

 

Each Plymouth Hotel object is crafted with particular attention to the entrance pylon and its relationship to the corner façade below, and to the contrast between the vertical slits and the horizontal banding across the surface. The finish is pale and smooth — close to the white-rendered concrete of the original — allowing a raking light to bring out the depth of the window eyebrows and the shadow of the vertical slits.

The window frames and door are made of etched brass — a material choice that reflects the precision of Skislewicz's engineering sensibility and the quality of the original building's detailing.

The result is an object that sits naturally within:

• architectural and design studios
• curated interiors
• bookshelves and workspaces

It appeals to architects, lovers of Art Deco and Streamline Moderne design, Miami Beach enthusiasts — and anyone who has turned the corner of 21st Street and stopped at the sight of that pylon.

 

An object shaped by three lives

 

The Plymouth has lived three distinct lives in its eighty-five years. It opened in 1940 as a vision of tomorrow — the most forward-looking hotel in a district full of forward-looking hotels. Within two years it was a GI barracks, its Art Deco lobby full of servicemen rather than holidaymakers. For more than two decades from 1987, it was a musicians' dormitory for the New World Symphony, its oval corridors filled with practice and rehearsal. In 2017, it was restored to find two extraordinary murals by Russian artist Ramon Chatov hidden beneath layers of renovation — their jewel tones of blue, red, and green becoming the palette for the entire redesign.

A building that has housed soldiers, musicians, and hidden artwork, all within an Art Deco shell that was itself designed as a quotation from a World's Fair, carries more history than most. As an object, that accumulated significance — three lives in one building — is what you hold.

 

Product details

 

• Subject: Plymouth Hotel, 336 21st Street, Collins Park, South Beach, Miami Beach, Florida 33139 (façade)
• Architect: Anton Skislewicz (1895–c.1970)
• Architectural style: Streamline Moderne / Tropical Deco
• Completed: 1940
• Part of: Miami Beach Art Deco Historic District (National Register of Historic Places, 1979)
• Materials: Plaster, etched brass window frames and door
• Designed and made by: Chisel & Mouse

 

Learn more about the Plymouth Hotel

 

For the full story of the building — Anton Skislewicz's extraordinary biography as a Croatian naval architect turned Miami Beach designer, the 1939 World's Fair inspiration, the building's three lives as hotel, barracks, and symphony dormitory, and the discovery of the Chatov murals — see our in-depth architecture guide:

Plymouth Hotel Architecture: Anton Skislewicz and the Tower That Looked Like Tomorrow