Architect

Smith and Williams

1946 to 1973

Whitney Smith and Wayne Williams portrait beside a hillside post and beam elevation, mid century modern office. AI generated image by Greg Anderson.

About Smith and Williams.

Smith and Williams was a South Pasadena architecture firm active from 1946 to 1973, producing over 600 projects across the San Gabriel Valley including private residences, schools, churches, and commercial buildings. The firm's pragmatic modernism shaped Pasadena, South Pasadena, San Marino, Sierra Madre, Arcadia, La Cañada Flintridge, Monrovia, and Azusa. The complete archive is held at the UC Santa Barbara Art, Design and Architecture Museum.

Questions about Smith and Williams

Who were Smith and Williams?

Whitney Rowland Smith, 1911 to 2002, was born in Pasadena, went to Pasadena City College and then USC, taking his architecture degree in 1934. He worked through the Depression as a movie set designer before joining the offices of Harwell Hamilton Harris and William L. Pereira between 1939 and 1940, and he taught architecture at USC from 1941 to 1942. He lived and worked for nearly fifty years at his residence and studio at 209 Beacon Avenue in South Pasadena, designated South Pasadena City Landmark Number 52 in 2011. Wayne Richard Williams, 1919 to 2007, was a USC student of Smith’s who joined the practice in 1946 and became a full partner when the firm formally became Smith and Williams in 1949. He was elevated to Fellow of the AIA in 1964 and taught at UC Berkeley in 1970. The firm dissolved in 1973 when Smith left, and both partners continued independently.

How much did they build here?

Somewhere between 600 and 800 projects between 1946 and 1973, most of them in this valley. The UC Santa Barbara Art, Design and Architecture Museum holds 236 linear feet of the firm’s records and tracks more than 600 distinct projects. They built across South Pasadena, Pasadena, San Marino, Sierra Madre, Arcadia, Azusa, Downey, Monrovia and La Canada Flintridge. Many of those houses sit in the MLS today with no architect attribution at all, and the buyers who end up in them never learn what they own. If you are looking at a postwar modernist house in any of those cities, send me the address and I will check it against the archive.

What does a Smith and Williams house look like?

Pragmatic California modernism. Post and beam structural systems left exposed inside. Walls of glass opening onto integrated landscape. A low pitched gable or near flat roof. Tongue and groove wood ceilings. A brick or fieldstone hearth and chimney anchoring the public rooms. And a carport rather than an enclosed garage. The commercial work adds folded plate, accordion pleated or saw tooth rooflines and steel and glass curtain walls. Robert Winter described them as experts in domestic architecture, and the 2015 Getty catalogue Outside In called the work pragmatic modernism that integrated landscape and building decisively. Where the attribution holds, Sell Odds reads it against documented modernist stock rather than the postwar inventory around it.

How do I verify an attribution?

Through the UC Santa Barbara Art, Design and Architecture Museum, which holds the primary archive. Its finding aid is published on the Online Archive of California as collection number 0000175 and lists project files, architectural drawings, blueprints, correspondence, photographic prints and specifications spanning roughly 1936 to 1987, with most known projects searchable by client name and by address. Secondary sources worth checking are the Pacific Coast Architecture Database, which holds individual building entries cross referencing the architects, the firm and the structure; USModernist.org, which keeps separate project lists for each partner; the Outside In catalogue; and the Calisphere portal for digitized photographs from the archive. A house marketed as a Smith and Williams design with no record behind it should be treated as unverified. Verbal attributions that have circulated in a neighborhood for thirty years are not a substitute for an archival record.

Could I buy an unrecognized one?

It happens, and it is the most interesting thing about this firm from a buyer’s side. Across the cities they worked in, dozens of postwar modernist houses sit in the MLS with no architect attribution. Some of them are documented in the UCSB archive and have simply never been connected to the listing record. A buyer who matches an address against the finding aid before submitting an offer is occasionally in a position to buy a firm designed house at unattributed pricing. That research costs an afternoon. That is an afternoon of research and a real pricing edge; call or text me at (310) 402-8430 and I will run the address against the finding aid.

Where was the firm’s home base?

South Pasadena, in a building they designed for themselves. The CFP Building at 1414 North Fair Oaks Avenue, completed in 1959 and named for the Community Facilities Planners collaboration the firm anchored, served as their offices from 1959 to 1973 and also housed the landscape architect Garrett Eckbo. It received an AIA Pasadena and Foothill Chapter Award of Excellence for Design in 1959, and the AIA Southern California Chapter lists it among the most significant examples of Los Angeles architecture built between 1947 and 1967. Their Tropical Gardens Apartments at 1675 Amberwood Drive of 1957 is a three story, twenty seven unit building for the Lomita Square Corporation, and a fourteen unit garden courtyard apartment on Fremont Avenue of 1955 is also documented in the archive.

What did they build in Pasadena?

Documented residential work includes the Robert Van Note House at 1235 Merendino Lane of 1948, with later alterations in 1955 and 1959, and the Salvatore Merendino House at 1270 Rancheros Road of 1951, designed in collaboration with Merendino himself, who was an industrial designer. The Playhouse District office complex designed for psychotherapy offices, with each unit opening onto a private garden through a full height glass wall, is another commonly cited example. A Green Street office building built between 1963 and 1965 carries the accordion pleated metal roof that became a recognizable signature of the firm’s later commercial work.

Why is restoration less forgiving here than on an older house?

Because the architectural integrity rests on visible structure rather than on decorative finish. A drywall clad ceiling concealing the original tongue and groove decking, a painted over post that was originally clear finished, or a vinyl window replacing an original steel frame each visibly breaks the design in a way that an equivalent change to a 1910 house would not. The original finishes are specific: vertical grain Douglas fir or redwood tongue and groove ceilings, exposed beams left clear finished or lightly stained, brick or fieldstone hearth, built in cabinetry in walnut or birch, terrazzo or asphalt tile in entry and service areas, oak or fir flooring in the public rooms. Many were replaced in 1990s and 2000s remodels and most are recoverable, but recovery needs period correct millwork sourcing and finish work that respects the original. On the condition side, expect original single pane glazing in steel or aluminum frames with failed gasketing, original hydronic radiant heating in concrete slabs that may still run but is hard to repair when it fails, flat or low pitched roof assemblies at the end of their service life, and electrical service sized for a 1960s household load rather than modern appliance and vehicle charging demand. A standard inspection will find the code cycle issues. It will not find the design integrity issues, and that difference is a builder question. A standard inspection will not price design integrity, and neither will an automated estimate, which is why Sell Odds reads attributed and unattributed postwar stock apart.

The San Gabriel Valley firm most buyers walk past without knowing it.

Smith and Williams (Wikidata Q104840114) designed somewhere between 600 and 800 projects between 1946 and 1973, most of them in the San Gabriel Valley. The UC Santa Barbara Art, Design and Architecture Museum holds 236 linear feet of the firm’s records and tracks more than 600 distinct projects. The firm built across South Pasadena, Pasadena, San Marino, Sierra Madre, Arcadia, Azusa, Downey, Monrovia, and La Cañada Flintridge. Many of these houses now sit in the MLS without any architect attribution, and the buyers who end up in them never learn what they actually own.

The firm’s style is consistent enough that style-feature identification works most of the time, unlike Roehrig where the catalog spans almost every late-Victorian-through-early-Modern idiom. A Smith and Williams residence reads as pragmatic California modernism: post-and-beam structural systems exposed in the interior, walls of glass opening onto integrated landscape, low-pitched gable or near-flat roof, tongue-and-groove wood ceilings, brick or fieldstone hearth and chimney as the anchor of the public rooms, and a carport rather than an enclosed garage. The firm’s commercial work introduces folded-plate, accordion-pleated, or saw-tooth rooflines and steel-and-glass curtain walls. Robert Winter described them as experts in domestic architecture; the catalog for the 2013 Pacific Standard Time exhibition Outside In (Getty Publications, 2015) described their work as “pragmatic modernism” that integrated landscape and building “decisively.”

For an SGV buyer the practical question is rarely “what does a Smith and Williams house look like.” It is “is this Smith and Williams or one of the dozens of other modernist firms working the same SGV market between 1946 and 1973, and does the attribution actually carry a documented archive.”

How to verify a Smith and Williams attribution.

The primary archive is held at the UC Santa Barbara Art, Design and Architecture Museum (ADC). The collection finding aid is published on the Online Archive of California (OAC) under collection number 0000175 and lists project files, architectural drawings, blueprints, correspondence, photographic prints, and specifications spanning roughly 1936 to 1987. Most known Smith and Williams projects are searchable by client name and address through that finding aid. The collection was partially processed under a Getty Foundation Archival Arrangement Description Grant.

Secondary verification sources include the Pacific Coast Architecture Database, which holds individual building entries for many Smith and Williams projects (each entry cross-references the architects, the firm, and the structure); USModernist.org, which maintains separately curated project lists for Whitney R. Smith and Wayne R. Williams; the 2015 catalog “Outside In: The Architecture of Smith and Williams,” published by Getty Publications and accompanying the UCSB AD&A Museum’s 2013 exhibition; and the Calisphere portal, which surfaces digitized photographs from the archive.

Wikipedia carries the canonical biographical entry for the firm (linked to Wikidata Q104840114) and separate entries for each partner. These are useful as a starting point but are not a substitute for the UCSB archive on a specific attribution question.

An SGV house marketed as a Smith and Williams design without an OAC or UCSB ADC record behind it should be treated as unverified. The firm worked on more than 600 projects, but a great many SGV modernist houses from this period were designed by other firms working similar idioms, and verbal attributions circulating in a neighborhood for thirty years are not a substitute for an archival record.

Where the firm built in the San Gabriel Valley.

South Pasadena was the firm’s home base. The CFP Building at 1414 North Fair Oaks Avenue, completed in 1959 and named for the Community Facilities Planners collaboration the firm anchored, served as the Smith and Williams offices from 1959 to 1973 and also housed the landscape architect Garrett Eckbo. The CFP Building received an AIA Pasadena and Foothill Chapter Award of Excellence for Design in 1959 and is listed by the AIA Southern California Chapter as one of the most significant examples of Los Angeles architecture constructed between 1947 and 1967. The firm’s Tropical Gardens Apartments at 1675 Amberwood Drive in South Pasadena (1957) is a three-story, twenty-seven-unit residential building built for the Lomita Square Corporation. A fourteen-unit garden courtyard apartment on Fremont Avenue in South Pasadena (1955) is also documented in the archive.

In Pasadena proper, documented residential work includes the Robert Van Note House at 1235 Merendino Lane (1948, with later alterations in 1955 and 1959) and the Salvatore Merendino House at 1270 Rancheros Road (1951, designed in collaboration with Merendino himself, who was an industrial designer). The firm’s Pasadena Playhouse District office complex designed for psychotherapy offices, each unit opening onto a private garden through a full-height glass wall, is another commonly cited example. A Green Street office building constructed between 1963 and 1965 carries the accordion-pleated metal roof that became a recognizable signature of the firm’s later commercial work.

Beyond Pasadena and South Pasadena, the UCSB ADC exhibition documentation lists Smith and Williams custom residential and commercial projects in San Marino, Sierra Madre, Arcadia, Azusa, Downey, Monrovia, and La Cañada Flintridge, with additional work elsewhere in Los Angeles and Orange Counties. The full SGV residential catalog is large enough that a buyer in any of these cities should treat the possibility of a Smith and Williams attribution as worth verifying any time a postwar modernist house comes onto the market.

The firm’s best-known residential work outside the SGV is Crestwood Hills in Brentwood, the Mutual Housing Association tract designed with A. Quincy Jones, Edgardo Contini, and others between 1946 and 1950 (LAHCM No. 680, Mutual Housing Association Site Office, designated 2000; LAHCM No. 797, Hamma House, designated 2005). Crestwood Hills is frequently the project that brings buyers to the firm’s name, but it is in West Los Angeles, not in the SGV. The Griffith Park Girl’s Camp (1951) is another widely cited early project.

What to look for as a buyer.

A Smith and Williams house from the late 1940s through the early 1970s is now between fifty and eighty years old. The structural systems are typically post-and-beam with exposed glulam or solid-sawn Douglas fir beams, tongue-and-groove decking, and walls that combine masonry hearth volumes with full-height glazing. The structural envelope tends to be sound. The finish work, mechanical systems, and glazing are where most of the buyer-side issues live.

Original Smith and Williams interior finishes typically include vertical-grain Douglas fir or redwood tongue-and-groove ceilings, exposed structural beams left clear-finished or with a light stain, brick or fieldstone hearth and chimney, built-in cabinetry in walnut or birch, terrazzo or asphalt-tile flooring in entry and service areas, and oak or fir flooring in the public rooms. Many of these have been replaced during 1990s and 2000s remodels with drywall ceilings, painted-over beams, drywall-clad hearth volumes, and white-painted cabinetry. The original interior is recoverable in most cases but requires period-correct millwork sourcing and finish work that respects the original.

Common condition issues are original single-pane glazing in steel or aluminum frames, often with failed gasketing and thermal-bridging problems; original hydronic radiant heating in concrete slabs, which may still function but is hard to repair when it fails; flat or low-pitched roof assemblies, particularly built-up or torch-down sections that have reached the end of their service life; and original electrical service that was sized for a 1960s household load and runs into problems with modern appliance and EV-charging demand. None of these are deal breakers. Each carries a meaningful rehabilitation cost.

Period-correct restoration for a Smith and Williams house has a smaller margin of error than for a Roehrig because the architectural integrity rests on visible structure rather than decorative finish. A drywall-clad ceiling concealing the original tongue-and-groove decking, a painted-over post that was originally clear-finished, or a vinyl window replacement of an original steel frame each visibly breaks the design. The buyer’s standard inspection identifies code-cycle issues but does not identify design-integrity issues. That distinction is a builder question.

Smith and Williams in the San Gabriel Valley market.

Attributed Smith and Williams residences transact rarely in the SGV market. South Pasadena and the broader SGV postwar modernist segment is small, closely watched by a specific buyer pool, and well-covered by a small handful of agents who specialize in the category. When a documented Smith and Williams house comes onto the market, the architectural attribution becomes the primary marketing fact, and the price reflects the documented-architect premium.

The harder market question is unattributed houses that may be Smith and Williams. Across the SGV cities the firm worked in, dozens of postwar modernist houses sit in the MLS without an architect attribution. Some of these are documented in the UCSB ADC archive and have simply never been connected to the listing record. A buyer who matches an address against the OAC finding aid before submitting an offer is occasionally in a position to acquire an unrecognized firm-designed house at unattributed pricing.

Sell Odds, the empirical probability engine behind Arroyo Casa’s market intelligence, is built to read a documented attribution directly: it separates attributed and archive-eligible listings from comparable unattributed houses and reads their sold and unsold outcomes, list-to-sale ratio and days on market included. That is the lens on the unattributed question too: where documentation and pricing diverge, archival research time is well spent.

The firm and its partners in San Gabriel Valley modernism.

Whitney Rowland Smith (FAIA) was born in Pasadena on January 16, 1911, and died in Bend, Oregon on March 13, 2002. He attended Pasadena City College, graduated from the University of Southern California with a bachelor’s degree in architecture in 1934, worked through the Depression as a movie set designer before joining the offices of Harwell Hamilton Harris and William L. Pereira between 1939 and 1940, and taught architecture at USC from 1941 to 1942. He lived and worked for nearly fifty years at his residence and studio at 209 Beacon Avenue in South Pasadena, designated South Pasadena City Landmark No. 52 in 2011. Wayne Richard Williams was born in Los Angeles on October 17, 1919, and died on November 27, 2007. He was a USC student of Smith’s, joined Smith’s practice in 1946, and became a full partner when the firm formally became Smith and Williams in 1949.

The firm dissolved in 1973 when Smith left. Both partners continued to practice independently afterward. Williams was an active AIA Southern California member from 1950 onward, was elevated to Fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 1964, and taught architecture at UC Berkeley in 1970.

The firm anchored the Community Facilities Planners collaboration with landscape architects Garrett Eckbo, Francis Dean, Robert Royston, and Edward Williams, and planners Simon Eisner and Lyle Stewart. CFP produced master plans, parks, commercial buildings, and the planning of California City. In the broader Southern California modernist narrative, Smith and Williams sits alongside A. Quincy Jones, Harwell Hamilton Harris, and Buff and Hensman as one of the firms that translated international-style modernism into a Southern California idiom rooted in landscape, climate, and the postwar California family.

Associated Styles.

Notable Works in the San Gabriel Valley.

Cities of Practice.

Related Architects.

Sources and references.

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