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Late in 1929, Santa Barbara architect George Washington Smith was
interviewed by the New York critic John Taylor Boyd, Jr., who was
conducting a series of interviews with America's most famous
architects for the magazine Art and Decoration. The inclusion of
Smith was perfectly understandable--buildings designed by this Santa
Barbara architect had been, from the beginning, a favorite of the
country's leading architecture and design magazines.
New Yorkers had been exposed to his buildings through photographs
and drawings in annual exhibitions of the Architectural League of
New York. In a review of the 1925 League exhibition, Matlack Price
wrote of Smith's ability to realize buildings of "exquisite
simplicity of design...of proportions," together with a sensitive
use of "the fine patterns of trees and shrubs made by sunlight and
shadows on the walls of the house."
Smith's work was equally appreciated in California, where he was
always mentioned as the leading exponent of the Hispanic and
Mediterranean revival of the 1920s. Although her house was never
built, the Hollywood film star Mary Pickford selected Smith to
design a ranch house for her and husband Douglas Fairbanks Jr. "His
homes, whether large or small, are remarkable in their directness,"
she said in an interview in Pacific Coast Architect in 1927, "in the
simplicity with which they speak the truths of this old architecture
as something eminently suitable to the creation of a tradition of
beauty."
When these New Yorkers and Californians, and certainly many of his
clients, characterized Smith's designs as simple, they were
responding to two important qualities: the purity of geometric
abstraction in his volumes and surfaces, countered by a strong sense
of the primitive. As Smith himself frequently pointed out, he
thought in terms of the primitive in his own art, just as did the
painters Paul Cezanne and Paul Gauguin, two 19th-century artists
whom he very much admired. The impressive impact of his buildings
was also an outcome of his sensitive response to each site and his
high regard for landscape architecture.
His houses and other buildings throughout California, in Arizona,
Texas and New York, played a fascinating visual game between strong
historical reminiscences and the developing modern idiom of those
years. In Europe, Smith had seen not only the wonders of Spain's
historic white cities, but also the work of many early modernists,
including the Swiss/French architect Le Corbusier. "Le Corbusier,"
he noted, "is a
tonic. Too severe, but a pioneer with vision."
Before he turned to architecture in Santa Barbara in 1919, Smith had
experienced several divergent careers in business and in art. He was
born in East Liberty, Penn., on Feb. 22, 1876, and since the day was
George Washington's birthday, he was given his name. His father was
a successful and highly respected engineer, who designed bridges and
elevated railroads. Smith was sent to Harvard to study architecture,
but was
unable to complete his formal education because of his parents'
financial reverses. He worked briefly in a Philadelphia
architectural firm, but found, as he put it, that his wages did not
provide him with the lifestyle he was used to. He then joined a bond
firm, and was so successful that he abandoned the world of business
to become a painter.
He and his wife Mary Greenough went off to Paris, where they lived
for three years while he studied and painted. With the advent of the
First World War, he returned to the United States in 1914 and
established himself in New York City, where he exhibited with
William Glackens, John Sloan, George Bellows, Robert Henri and
Eugene Speicher. His paintings were shown at the McDowell Club in
New York, the
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, the Corcoran
Gallery, Washington, D.C., and the Chicago Art Institute.
He came to California in 1915 to see his paintings exhibited at the
Gallery of Fine Arts at the Panama Pacific Exposition in San
Francisco, and decided to stay for the duration of the war. It was
Smith's intent to return to Paris, but through Philadelphia friends
he was attracted to Montecito. Since he and his wife were going to
be here for a few years, he decided to design and build a studio
residence. The design sources for this 1916 house were the
Andalusian farm houses he had experienced on a trip to Spain in
1914.
The house was an instant success in California and nationally--it
was published and republished throughout the country, and
illustrations of it were used by the manufacturers of Portland
Cement and by tile makers. Locally Smith "found that people were not
really eager to buy my paintings, which I was laboring over, as they
were to have a white-washed house like mine. So I put away the
brushes and have not yet had a moment to take them up again."
Smith's architectural career lasted only 12 years, from 1919 to
1930. But during these years he (with the assistance of his
draftsperson, Lutah Maria Riggs, who joined his office in 1922)
produced a remarkable array of buildings, both in quality and
quantity--of 80 designs for new or substantially remodeled homes in
Santa Barbara County, 54 were built. Many were based on Spanish,
Mexican and Hispanic California precedents, but he also designed in
the Italian, French Norman, and English Tudor modes. His 1926-28
Crocker Fagan house at Pebble Beach is America's one and only
example of a Byzantine house. In Texas, for the Van Wyck Maverick
family (1926-28), he created one of the most impressive
courtyard-oriented houses built during these years, and he
introduced the world of Spain to, of all places, Fisher's Island off
the coast of New York (in his Cheney house of 1928-29). At the time
of his death he was just beginning to
explore modern architecture in his unrealized Art Deco-inspired
Crocker house (1929-39) in Pebble Beach.
Like many architects of his generation, Smith continually explored
and expanded his knowledge of historic as well as contemporary
architecture. He visited throughout Mexico making measured drawings
and taking photographs, and in the 1920s he returned several times
to Europe, examining and recording buildings and gardens in Spain,
Italy and France. He amassed an impressive library devoted to
architecture and landscape architecture--if one pages through these
books one frequently comes across notes indicating individual
buildings or details that interested him.
In the 1925 exhibition of the Architectural League of New York,
Smith's work was commended for achieving "an effect that is at once
original, personal and distinctly American." Although taste in
architectural imagery has shifted radically in one direction and
another from the late 1930s to the present, Smith's buildings have
continued to be discussed and admired on a regional and national
level. In recent years architect Charles Moore has written
appreciatively about Smith. In his 1990 volume on The Architect and
the American Country House, Mark Alan Hewitt wrote that Smith "stood
above his peers as a genius whose work epitomized and extended the
limits of the Mediterranean idiom."
A visit today to any one of his houses in Montecito, Pasadena or
Woodside will easily reveal why writers and critics have always
responded so strongly to his designs. Smith was one of that rare
breed of architects who was able to produce buildings that were both
subservient to their environment and at the same time able to
project strong, beautiful forms into the landscape.
Above reprinted with
permission of Santa Barbara Magazine |
