Browse Items (57 total)

Whitney Smith described his design for the Santa Ana Woods tract development as one of his best: "a tract of 104 houses, set far apart from other neighborhoods by natural barriers. The exclusive atmosphere further emphasized by the stone entrance."

The Welborn Phillips Company was a developer of tract homes. Smith and Williams created a brochure which illustrated their philosophy on tract housing. They highlighted such details as exterior masonry planter boxes to give a pleasant view from…

For the long, narrow, 1300 square foot house for Leo Zwell, Smith designed a straight line of rooms, with each one having a full wall of glass facing onto the brick terrace. A "light trough" or linear skylight provided natural light to the…

The Harold Bradley house in Pasadena makes maximum use of a small lot, by yielding a small area to the driveway and garage, and reserving the focal point for a garden terrace. The terrace provides garden views and access for all the major rooms of…

In 1946, a group of four friends decided to pool their resources and buy land in the hills above Sunset Boulevard to build homes for their families. The group soon grew to over 400 interested parties, and the group became the Mutual Housing…

The pavilion was designed by Smith and Williams in 1958, and contained walls which were inset with milk-white, blue, and translucent glass panels.

In 1944-1945 the Barr Lumber Company invited three architects to design model houses for an unbuilt experiment and engaged landscape architect Garrett Eckbo to create gardens for each of the proposals. For his submission, Whitney Smith wrote an…

Smith and Williams designed more residential and commercial buildings but produced many master plans and planning studies for public and civic projects. The expansion of the state college and university systems provided work for many architects…

These medical offices have an unusual form and are very difficult to see from the exterior. In the simplified plan, the building is composed of two adjacent circles connected by a diamond- shaped reception vestibule. Patients enter through a small…

In a letter dated September 1955 to Dan MacMasters at the Los Angeles Examiner’s Pictorial Living section, Smith described the Armstrong house as having no front or back. All four sides, he wrote, were designed for looking ‘at’ and for looking…

The post office was designed to anchor a small suburban shopping center. A reproduction of a rendering in the archive shows that the decorative folded detail on the façade was to be carried through onto the fronts of the other buildings in the…

Photographs in the Smith and Williams’s files show the students at John Marshall congregating in groups at the edge of the campus. The design for a new cafeteria gracefully accommodates the students’ energetic sociability with a space that is…

Community Facilities Planners produced a master plan for the parks of the City of Lakewood that called for creating four parks over 10 years. Smith and Williams designed the structures.

Community Facilities Planners produced comprehensive planning reports for the Buena Park Civic Center and the Brea Civic Center.

Smith and Williams arranged the office spaces in six pavilions connected by covered walkways that carry people from the edge of the site to each of the six pavilions.

Wayne Williams and Robert Meyerhof, associate partner in the Smith and Williams’s office, designed a multi-level arrangement of decks and stair landings with an elaborate post-and-beam system that gives the impression of a tree house. The…

Whitney Smith, the partner in charge, designed a tent-like structure for a new sanctuary, in deference to the Methodist open door philosophy of worship. The interior furnishings, including the cross, communion table and rail, lectern and pulpit were…

Smith and Williams created, at the time, the longest unsupported plywood vaults for this church. The clerestories under the vaults are lighted at night, which makes the roof appear to float.

Prior to 1966, the Neighborhood Church congregation used a sanctuary building at 535 South Pasadena Avenue that had been built in 1887 as the First Congregational Church. In 1946, the church expanded its facilities. Smith and Williams designed a…

The building on S. Fair Oaks in Pasadena was designed to be four separate buildings housed under one large metal lattice roof, which covers the gardens and offers privacy. The original group of Community Facilities Planners included: Smith and…

The first Smith and Williams office space was a converted structure on a property belonging to a Mrs. Armstrong, on South Los Robles Avenue in Pasadena.

Wayne Williams was the project manager for Community Facilities Planners on this unbuilt project in Lake Mead, Nevada. The development was to include homes, apartments, a mobile home park, hotels and shopping center, sporting areas, all clustered…

The Port Holiday resort was never built, but was to be located in the northwest corner of Lake Mead's Boulder Basin, just outside of Las Vegas, on the way to the Hoover Dam. The client, J. Carlton Adair, commissioned the studies and conceptual…

The restaurant at Newport Dunes resort was commissioned by the Fred Harvey Company, which was known for hotels and restaurants that were part of train depots in the southwest United States in the early 20th century. The three story circular…

The Newport Dunes development was a planned resort destination in Newport Beach. The rendering and photographic aerial views show contrasting visions of design and reality.

An associate architect in the Smith and Williams offices, Robert Thorgusen, designed a beach bath house with an undulating wall of sprayed concrete and metal lath. Thorgusen may have also designed the wooden lifeguard station.

The drive-in laundry used the canopy (33 feet wide and 48 feet long) to catch the customer’s eye as well as to shelter customers and the car hops who retrieved and delivered laundry for waiting cars. The triangular space frame truss is accented by…

The design of this Mobil station solved the requirements for auto maneuverability on a tight site with modern engineering. Smith and Williams hung four canopies of open web steel on poles to shelter gas pumps, the service area, rest rooms, and the…

Constructed on Pasadena’s main street, Colorado Blvd., this structure won an A.I.A. award. The jury praised the CAPSA Carwash for possessing lightness and motion. The steel-skeleton structure takes full advantage of its openness to create a…

Smith and Williams designed several schemes for Ralphs Grocery Stores. For the South Pasadena location, they designed a distinctive frame for the facade that faces the parking lot. The frame is made up of an expressionistic roof edging held up by…

This is a rendering of an unbuilt design for a country market.
The use of a metal lath roof easily defines the space of the market and encompasses all its activities and products. A similar roof design was incorporated into the building for…

The saw tooth edge of the Friend Paper Company roof creates a distinctive character for the building on the street. What is not as noticeable is the double roof system that Smith and Williams created to modulate the effect of heat and light coming…

Of all Smith and Williams’s buildings, the union structures are the most modernistic. The glass, steel and concrete buildings present forthright, transparent façades to their members and communities. The materials also represent the sleek and…

Brick and colored, clear, and painted glass were used to create visually pleasing spaces inside—a lobby and conference room—and read on the exterior as colorful volumes.
A preliminary design proposed a façade that resembled a computer punch…

The wood beams are used in a craftsman mode and contribute to the soothing domestic appeal of this small medical building.

This medical building comprises four separate structures, connected by stairways and an L-shaped second floor. The round building, closest to Las Tuna Drive, originally was a pharmacy.

The exterior is reserved but the inside is full of visual excitement. Wooden screens and colored glass separate reception from waiting areas, and animate the small space. As in their other doctors’ offices, the scale and materials create a…

Medical offices became a Whitney Smith specialty; he designed two before 1949 and at least 14 with Smith and Williams. This refined design, perhaps his best, was made of concrete and wood. Patients entered through a landscaped area, now devoted to…

The house for Dr. and Mrs. Bernauer Newton and family is considered one of their boldest designs for integrating inside and outside spaces.
The bedrooms for the Newton house are in separate pavilions connected to the living area by covered…

This house was designed for a musician and an artist on a heavily wooded lot that included nearly 50 mature trees, some of which the architects allowed to grow through the eaves, rather than remove. The architects designed the house as two separate…

Robert Thorgusen of Smith and Williams was in charge of this exhibition house for the annual Orange County Home Show. Two identical rectangles—one for living and one for sleeping— are adjacent to a central court and surrounded by decks. Exposed…

The house for Dr. Daniel Siegel and his family uses a strong circulation element, in this case a ramp, to organize the living areas on a deep and steep lot. The entrance to the house is strongly marked with a long covered walk. Cobblestones are used…

The Anderson house is arranged in two sections connected by a hall-bridge that runs between the living house and the sleeping house. The structure sits lightly on the site so as not to disturb the rocks and mature oaks. Decks create separate outdoor…

The Salet house was built as a mother-in-law unit on the same property, yet secluded from, the main house. The tadpole-shaped plan has a square, open plan living and dining zone, which separates living spaces from bedrooms. Opposite the entry is an…

As in many of Smith and Williams’s houses, the fireplace is set in a window wall. The architects bring nature directly into the house through views and by means of a stone wall that penetrates the living room from outside. A garden court sits at…

A central garden room separates living and sleeping zones from the kitchen. The roof is pitched to capture light and views from the hilltop site. The use of concrete block in the garden room may have inspired Smith and Williams’s model house for…

Interior screens separate the functions in the open plan living zone of the Goodrich house and yet still keep the volume spacious.

For the Calvin Goodrich house, Whitney Smith designed a "petal" roof: four identical gables, floating above…

The house for William B. Wilcox was designed by Whitney Smith and described as an adult house for informal living and entertaining. The kitchen cooking unit and the fireplace are back-to-back, making circulation between living, dining, and kitchen…

The Crowell house site is on a hilltop, at the edge of a ravine. The design won an Award of Merit in 1956 in a contest sponsored by House & Home and Sunset magazine. The A.I.A. judges cited the manner in which the “Japanese-influenced house”…

In the final design for the Booth house, a deck extends all the way across the outside and beyond the edges of the living room, integrating the outside and inside areas into one living space, close to trees. The Booth house is similar to the Crowell…

Smith and Williams designed the Divina Vista housing tract for the Security Development Corporation in the Los Angeles suburb of Monterey Park.

Smith and Williams argued that the problem of tract houses— small lots too close together—could be…

The great variety of work in the Smith and Williams’s office mirrors the growth of Los Angeles, so it is not surprising that they designed more than 50 tract housing projects. One of the best is a small development of 13 houses in Northridge for…

Smith had an opportunity in the Spencer house to realize some of the ideas in his Case Study House 12. The Spencer’s property contained a number of garden structures, including a Greene and Greene lath house. Sketches in the Spencer file show Smith…

Philip Roulac, a builder and contractor, became a frequent client of and collaborator with Smith and Williams. He built most of the houses that Smith and Williams designed in San Marino. When Roulac purchased land that included the 1934 pump house,…

This house may be the strongest example of Smith’s and Williams’s belief in the architect as a solver of problems. Smith convinced the Dunns not to tear down their Greene and Greene-designed James Culbertson house. The Dunns wanted a smaller,…

Smith’s own house began as a garage on a piece of land that had been part of a larger residential property. He wrote about the house in a letter to an editor at the Ladies Home Journal in 1948: “The garden walls and landscaping positively define…

Portraits of both Whitney Smith and Wayne Williams can be found in both the Smith and Williams collection as well as the Wayne Williams collection.

Whitney Rowland Smith was born in Pasadena in 1911 and lived there most of his life. He entered the…