By Christa Vragel, Writer
The firm Ted Smith and Kathleen McCormick Smith and Others Architects is an alternative practice founded in 1973. Principals Ted Smith and Kathleen McCormick, who joined in 1981, have completed a wide range of unusual housing projects acting as developers, architects, and contractors in addition to their more traditional practice.
The two work in partnership by assigning ultimate responsibility to one or the other. These development projects include:
The Upas Street houses, where three single-family houses in a downtown infill site were offered for sale without interior partitioning, allowing the buyers rather than the developers to determine the layout.
In Del Mar, the company built six loft houses in a string of buildings over a six year period, separating the commercial and residential zones. Each house, called a GoHome, contains six tiny suites and provides some of San Diego’s most affordable ownership and rents.
In 1989, the firm developed an early example of the Eastern prototype, the Row House, on Cortez Hill. The project, the Richman-Poorman Building mixes market rate affordable “GoHomes”, with luxury town houses.
In 1997 the firm developed new housing in Little Italy as a member of a team of architects and developers who divided the status quo full block development into small parcels. The project, the response to an RFP for a housing demonstration block sponsored by the Centre City Development Corporation, combines row houses, subsidized family housing, and market rate affordable lofts, all surrounding an open space in the center of the block.
As well as developing these and other multi-unit properties in the San Diego area, the firm also has had the honor of inclusion in the 2008 Venice Biennale as part of the US Pavilion.
In 2005 Smith initiated a new graduate program to teach development strategies to architects at Woodbury University. Then in 2014, the RED office was created and staffed by graduates of the Woodbury Master’s degree program as the successor company augmenting and expanding the Ted Smith and Kathleen McCormick Smith and Others’ practice.
Ted and Kathleen’s lecture, entitled “An Alternative Practice,” will be based on nearly 40 years of practice together, financing, designing, and building projects across the region.