Early Career
Born in Benicia, California, he traveled as a child around the world with his father, Lansing Bond Mizner, a lawyer and the U. S. minister to Guatemala, who was recalled to the United States in 1891 by President Benjamin Harrison after the Barrundia Affair.
Little is known about Addison Mizner's sketches and artwork prior to his architectural career, but his subsequent work shows him to be a fine draftsman and an artist who painted beautiful watercolors.
Although he lacked formal university training, Mizner served a 3 year apprenticeship in the office of San Francisco architect, Willis Jefferson Polk, eventually becoming a partner. Later, while traveling in Hawaii, he co-authored a book with Ethel Watts Mumford entitled The Cynic's Calendar of Revised Wisdom for 1903. The book was an unexpected success and spawned seven sequels. Later, he also wrote with her The Limerick Up To Date Book (1903) and The Complete Cynic (1910).
He eventually relocated to New York City, where he designed numerous country houses across Long Island and the region. In 1907, he and William Massarene designed White Pine Camp, a retreat in the Adirondack Mountains, later used by U. S. President Calvin Coolidge as his "Summer White House".
Read more about this topic: Addison Mizner
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or career:
“He had long before indulged most unfavourable sentiments of our fellow-subjects in America. For, as early as 1769,... he had said of them, “Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for any thing we allow them short of hanging.””
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)