Architect

Smith and Williams

1946–1973

Profile

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.

The SGV 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 SGV.

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 SGV 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 running on the Arroyo Casa market intelligence backend, tracks architect-attributed and architect-eligible listings across the SGV and shows the documented-architect premium as a measurable shift in both list-to-sale ratio and days on market. The data also shows where the market is currently treating possibly-Smith-and-Williams listings as if they were verified, and where the discount on unverified inventory is wide enough to make archival research time well spent.

The firm and its partners in SGV 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.

Styles

Associated Styles.

Works

Notable Works in the SGV.

Sources

Sources and references.

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This guide is informational and is not legal, tax, or financial advice. Mills Act eligibility, ADU permitting, and property tax implications vary by property and by year. Consult the relevant city, the Los Angeles County Assessor, and a licensed tax professional for guidance specific to your situation.