Saving Modernism: George Smart’s Mission to Preserve Design History

A Welcome to Practice Disrupted, a podcast where we find ways to create new solutions to current challenges while elevating the value of architects. I'm your host, Evelyn Li, an architect who spans tech as an angel investor, startup advisor, and founder of Practice of Architecture. Whether you're a seasoned architect or just starting in the field, this podcast podcast is your gateway to think differently about the role architects play within our global community. Hello, disruptors. Welcome to this week's episode of Practice Disrupted. Today, we're joined by George Smart, the founder and CEO of U. S. Modernist, the world's largest nonprofit archive dedicated to documenting, preserving, and promoting modernist residential design.

A Georgia's passion for modernism has turned into a national movement, changing how we think about preservation. What started as a local website cataloging houses in North Carolina has grown into a massive archive covering over 25,000 modernist homes, a 40 architects, and more than 5,000,000 pages of historic magazines, all freely accessible online. He's also the host of US Modernist Radio ranked by Dwell as a number two architecture and design podcast, where he's led over 400 episodes with guests from across the design world. In this conversation, we'll explore George's journey from a personal passion to a national preservation force, the surprising stories behind moving and saving modernist homes, and his advice for architects looking to connect with more people who love the modern movement. Hi, George. Welcome to the show. I'm so grateful to have this time with you.

B Oh, it's a pleasure. Thank you, Evelyn.

A So you are the executive director for US Modernist, and I'm going to be honest and say, I didn't really actually know much about US Modernist until you reached out to me to be on your podcast. So I thought this would be a great opportunity to introduce my listeners to what US Modernist is. It's how it got started and and your story and the evolution of it as as a platform. Sound good?

B Oh, sure. Yeah.

A So what inspired you to start US Modernist?

B Well, this started as a local organization called Triangle Modernist Houses about eighteen years ago. We quickly became a five zero one c three. And in 2013, we went statewide. In 2015, we went national. So now we work all over the country. And our purpose is to document and preserve and promote a modernist residential architecture from the mid century versions of the forties and fifties and sixties to the experimental versions of the seventies and eighties and nineties, and the kind of the rebirth of modern from the nineties on through today. We do that by maintaining and creating, the largest online resource for modern architecture in the world. USmodernist.org has extensive archives that are all free, all easy to access.

B You don't even have to register, and you can go on there and you can take a deep dive into whatever really you're passionate about. Whether it's, a house you own, a house you admire, an architect you're a fan of, or you're trying to find Architecture Forum April nineteen fifty four, we've got it.

A Can you talk a little bit about what are the different resources that you are pulling from? Initially, did you start pulling together all of this research? Can I submit to USMARTINIS? How does that all work?

B So let's start with our main archives, which is about 23,000 houses and profiles of about a 80 architects. So what most websites do is they'll focus on a geographic area like Cleveland, and they'll try to find all the houses in Cleveland. We do it by architect. So for instance, we would take Frank Lloyd Wright or Tom Kundig and try to find every house that architect ever did. What state it's in? Has it been destroyed? Has it been sold? Has it been remodeled? Has it been remodeled badly? Anything like that. And and make a full record of that. And doing that over and over and over, you get a really comprehensive tool that's quite useful for a whole variety of audiences. It can be for real estate buyers, owners, and sellers.

B It can be for education, for our professors and design students. The media uses this quite a bit. A preservationist uses all the time, and that was our our premier archive. Now in 2013, I got a phone call from Charlotte, North Carolina, which is about two and a half hours away, from a realtor standing in a wet basement of an architect who had passed away. And he said, I've heard about you guys. We've got 20 boxes of old, moldy architecture magazines down here from, looks like, the forties. Do you want them? And I was thinking, oh, well, you know, what the hell? Okay. Let's take them.

B So I got on Craigslist and got one of those guys who'll pick up anything in a truck to drive down to Charlotte, get the boxes, bring them back. And over the next week or so, using five old eBay scanners that we bought, we digitized a couple hundred thousand pages of magazines and put them online. And immediately, this was one of the pivot points for the archive. People love this, and they wanted more. And so we started encouraging donations. We would get donations from architecture offices of more recent things, like, you know, nineties is about as far back as the offices would go. Then universities would deaccession to us when they were getting rid of old magazines. The AIA was our largest donor.

B They gave us 700,000 pages of magazines that fortunately were en route between, temporarily closing the basement archives and their, Maryland storage facility. So we took all those magazines and scanned them and sent them back and now have those online. And those are all the state and local publications of the AIA going back to the nineteen thirties.

A What made you so interested in Modernist in the first place that you started this in the Triangle area?

B Well, my my excuse for starting it was that I wanted to build a new house, and I'd always loved modern as a style, always been attracted to it. So I went online one dark and stormy night in 02/2007 and was googling for modernist houses in the Raleigh area and found these these really great ones that many of which have been destroyed or or badly renovated. One in particular called the Catalano House had been destroyed a few years before that. It was the first hyperbolic paraboloid residence in the country, and it was in every magazine in the world pretty much in 1954 when it came out, but it was gone. And about three hours later, I had this awakening that I had been to these houses when I was five or six years old because my dad was an architect. And he had taken me to these places, and I had just somehow repressed this architectural memory, and it all came flooding back. So I decided, okay, well, this is great. I'll make a list of these houses as I find them.

B And I did. I went to see some of my dad's friends, these guys in their eighties. He had passed away by then. And they said, oh, yeah. There are hundreds of these around. If you'll come pick me up and drive me around, I'll show you where they are. So I would spend afternoon driving around these 80 year old guys hanging my iPhone out the window, taking pictures of houses, and pretty soon we had a list of a couple of hundred. And then somebody suggested, you know, George, you should put this on a website.

B So I made a free website, put everything up on there, and then it just kinda took off from there. Everybody in North Carolina started contributing. So now we have identified 5,000 houses in North Carolina. We're the number three state, and that's because of NC State's leadership in modernist architecture in the forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies. So many graduates came out of that program and did houses for their friends and family and clients. And then when we extended to doing this for The United States, of course, number just went up from there. And it's been a wild, fun, lovely ride ever since.

A Now being an architect, I obviously appreciate that you are kind of sorting by architect rather than geographic location. What was the impetus for the switch? Because I think as, as you said, many people would start with the, the address, right, of these buildings.

B Right. Right. Well, I was intrigued personally when I would find a a great house by an architect. What else did he or she do? You know, anywhere. It didn't really matter where it was. And I found that it was also more efficient to do the research that way because either through the architect's firm, if it was still around, or through archives at universities, we could find a project list. And then from there, we could determine where the houses were and the other additional information we could find about them. So it made putting together these comprehensive archives that much easier.

A It's interesting because I'm looking at the archives on your website students, right? So of course I subscribed. And how many times I lugged that catalog until my husband's finally like, you're this is taking up, like, three bookshelves in the house. You never crack one open. Is it just there for show? What are you doing? So to know that now all of that is available online, and I also wrote for a contract magazine for a while, and now I know that I can go back and access even some of my older articles from the archives. This is quite amazing when you take the time to go through your website and see everything that's that's on. It's actually really hard to digest it.

B It it's more than I can take in, really. I mean, we've got 5,000,000 pages of magazines in there and even more that we've scanned and are working to getting the rights to post.

A I appreciate it. So what if I am a young architect? I believe I'm doing some modernist architecture. Is there a way for me to be amongst these great architects too on your website?

B So there there are two ways to do it. So if you're a young architect and you haven't achieved, you know, greatness yet, but you live in North Carolina, We will take any architect that is doing modernist residential and put them on the website. We have about 300, maybe 320 architects in there. The only requirement to come in is to be doing a new house from the ground up, not a renovation, not an addition, something else like that. For the national website, we only focus on architects that have achieved some level of fame and fortune because there there are tens of thousands out there, and and we have to focus our resources. So we we're adding on now probably, you know, maybe 10 a year. We're trying to catch up on some of the ones that were second tier well known in the sixties and seventies. And and this is because sometimes we're the only record of these houses.

B When people are trying to to find information about them, they find us. And and that's important because without that information, it's just that weird house down the street. And it's probably gonna sell as a tear down and go away. And that's what we wanna keep happening because these houses are basically works of art you can live in.

A What do you identify as somebody with a relative stature of fame and and and fortune when it comes to cataloging it on your website?

B So we look for an architect that's it's fairly prolific. It's done a lot of houses, not just a few, or that has achieved, like, meteoric status, but has a few houses in their background that we wanna find. Like Zaha Hadid has done a few residences in her time. Yarki Ingalls now has done a few houses in his company and is doing a few more, actually. They have a very small residential practice no one really quite knows about. You know, that way we can have, you know, easier access to find the information and have a better chance of making a complete record of everything they've done.

A Now you've talked a lot just earlier on about all the individuals that are accessing US modernist and using it as a resource. A historian, realtors. Is there a certain group that you find is really interested in this archive more than others?

B Well, the biggest group is just the fans. These are not architects. They are mere mortals like me for whom in their lives design is the ninth or tenth or eleventh priority in their life. It's not one, two, or three like a professional would have. So for them, this is a a great way for them to be able to explore and do so in a way that is easy to access. It doesn't cost them anything, and they can find out about all the different activities going on. And we have a newsletter that goes out to 64,000 people on every Monday, and in it, we include a calendar of fun, modernist events people can go to all around the country. So people look to us for that as well.

A And if I'm an event host because obviously, there's a lot of AI chapters out there that sometimes host housing tours. How do I contact you to

B So I I am the easiest person to find on the web. My address, name, and phone number at the bottom of every page on our website, and we have hundreds and hundreds of pages. You can just Google George Smart Modernist, and you'll find me. And people send press releases. People send houses that are for sale that are a special note. People send information about events, like there's tours in Los Angeles. There is the Glass House Summer Party in New Canaan. There's Modernism Week in various cities around the country.

B I mean, so many things that people who are not in the architecture industry would love to go do. And, of course, for architects, there are the CE courses and the AIA conferences and the meetings and things like that. But we don't really cover those things except if they involve the public in some way.

A And that was the crux of the question. Really, who do you see as your audience that is coming to visit and partake in this vast archive that you have? So you mentioned that this started just out of your own interest in building a modernist house for yourself, but it's become really kind of a part of of who you are. You're synonymous with US modernists now. You are well known. You have the podcast as well. Sound like it's it's taken over more of your life than just your your house.

B Oh, yes. I mean, my wife refers to this as an eighteen year seizure. So there's that.

A What keeps you so passionate about this work and and sharing it?

B Well, when I started when I started documenting things, I I kept thinking to myself, like, surely, somebody's done this already. Like, surely the AIA has done it or some university has done it. And I found that almost without exception, like, I think except for maybe Frank Lloyd Wright and Richard Neutra and maybe John Lautner, there were really no comprehensive listings of work by architect. It was all by geography. And so I just headed down that road and eventually came to find out that nobody was doing this really. There were monographs that were getting published, which sometimes helped us because they would put project lists in the back. But they didn't drill down deep to try to find where all the houses, are they still standing, what's going on with them. Because our ultimate goal is to make sure that as many of these houses that can be preserved will be preserved.

B And you can't save something if you don't know where it is and why it's important.

A Enjoying the show? Join a community of fellow disruptors at practiceofarchitecture.com/community. Your membership helps support the production of this podcast, Practice Disrupted, and funds the creation of more resources for all of you. Looking forward to growing together. Join us today at practiceofarchitecture.com/community. So speaking of that house down the street that it just happens to be a tear down, do you have any stories that you can recall where people contacted you and it resulted in a different outcome for the house?

B Oh, we have lots of those. I mean, we estimate just in North Carolina. Just by documenting the houses and and putting them in our newsletter and highlighting them, we probably helped about 400 houses change hands. Now all of those wouldn't necessarily have been destroyed, but, many of them would have languished and gone unsold for a longer period of time. I mean, what's really missing is, is how to sell and market these houses. Realtors by and large, don't like modernist houses. You know, to be honest, the sellers are a little weird and, the buyers are a little weird and the houses are also a little weird. So your typical realtor, unless they have a passion for this, just wants to get the thing sold at whatever price to whoever comes along and doesn't care so much about the preservation.

B So we're trying to make sure these houses end up in the hands of a new caring owner who will carry it on for another thirty, forty years.

A Yeah, absolutely. I feel like that's another opportunity for you and US modernists to have a whole real estate side or real like a for US modernist for sale type of

B Well, you know, we looked into that, and the problem is is is just we'd have to become real estate agents in all these states, and it becomes very complicated. And we can't even take financial part in the transaction without being part of that licensure. So we just designed this into our our program to advertise a lot of these houses for free. And that way we sidestep all the complication and just focus on the preservation.

A So if I'm interested in supporting the work that you're doing, what's the best way to do that?

B Oh, there are so many ways people can get involved. I mean, just coming to the site and exploring around. Every week, I get an email. It's time stamped about 03:30 in the morning, and someone stayed up all night. They started about 10:00, and they just couldn't stop. And that they're looking at house after house after house or going through magazines, trying to find something from their childhood or something they admire. They can become members. We have a membership people can be part of.

B They can be on our newsletter, which comes every week. We have tours and trips that they can do with us all around the country and Europe. If they live in North Carolina, we have a lot of local events. We have an architecture movie series here every month during the winter. And then twelve months a year, we have what we call thirst for architecture, which is an architecture happy hour that people come to and just kind of hang out with each other because they have a shared interest. And and surprisingly, 95% of the people that come to thirst for architecture are not architects. And I tell them all the time, like, you really should be coming here because this is like, you know, shooting fish in a barrel. There are all these people who have aspirations of their next house you could be designing.

A Absolutely. The business operations part of me is like, okay, we have a website that has a a ton of activity from potential clients. Why aren't more architects figuring out how to how to connect with the community that you've created?

B Right.

A It's interesting, you know, just in the conversation, how you talk about US modernist houses being a little weird, and the sellers and the buyers also being, you know, weird or a certain quirkiness, a certain love of all things modernist. So in your mind, in the modernism in the biggest, bigger within the space of the bigger contextualization of the built environment, Why is it so important that we are preserving the history and the contemporary interpretation of the modernist movement?

B Well, I don't know if it's any more important than any other movement, but it's just it's time to be preserved. I mean, in the in the fifties and sixties, everybody was all about Victorians. Right? So we were gonna save all the Victorians from the eighteen nineties and the nineteen hundreds, and that phase kind of came and went. And now we are preserving all the mid century moderns. And, you know, what's coming up, which is gonna be real interesting, is preserving the postmoderns This started getting, you know, in the seventies and eighties, because people are very divided about whether they even like postmodernism or not. Right? But that's the next phase to come along. What we're trying to do while we're in the phase for mid century modernism is to encourage new modernism, to encourage architects and their clients to keep this style going and to improve on it and and to not drift too far away from it if possible. Because if you're an owner of one of these houses, it's truly an incredible experience.

B I mean, the vibe in these homes is wonderful for living. It's more relaxed. It's more open, you know, with with light and air and, you know, the improvements in in glass and steel and insulation and technology have made these great houses from the fifties even better now when they're remodeled.

A So it sounds like because I was gonna talk to you about the the future of US modernist and where it's it's heading. It sounds like you're kind of working through the catalog of of the timeline. A lot of your growth, though, has been somewhat organic in nature. Right? You started locally. You went statewide. Nationally, you got calls, right, of these magazine archives. Do you have any intentional plans of where you wanna go from here and how you wanna grow?

B Oh, yes. I mean, my background is in strategic planning, so we've had intentional plans all along. We have a capital campaign going where we want to raise about $3,000,000. This will allow me to retire from my role as executive director and hire in somebody new who will continue the organization for the next ten or twenty years. We also want to continue to refine the website, but not get it to where it's too complicated. I don't know how many design websites you've been on where it's almost indecipherable. Like, you go on an architect firm website, you can't find their phone number because it's so embedded in all this high design that's floating around. Our website is good old school 1998 HTML code.

A That's what I learned, you know, my mom taught me in middle school to code in an HTML, and I

B Yeah. It's fresh Fred Flintstone code. And the nice thing about that is you can make it look good, but it is completely unbreakable. It never goes down. There's nothing wonky to do. We don't have to pay exorbitant fees every month to keep it going. And I can train somebody in an hour how to work on it. So that allows us to keep our costs down as a nonprofit moving forward.

B Now I'm sure that one day we will transit to some sort of platform, but that's in the future.

A Yeah. I was gonna say, I mean, with with AI and their ability to pull out even the digital like, everything that you have digitally scanned and to to bring it forward, that's gonna be amazing. Obviously, a much heavier lift than your standard HTML. How soon are you looking to retire?

B Well, I mean, you know, if somebody came to me with a check for $3,000,000, I'd check out probably in April. So, I mean, I love this. I'll tell you, I part of me wants to do it forever, but I don't think that's very practical or very smart because the founder needs to pass it on to the next level kind of sustainer executive who takes it to another place. So I know that very well, and that's where we wanna head.

A Do you have a favorite architect, a favorite building in your catalog that you constantly find yourself referring to, or, you know, something that you ended up really modeling your own house after?

B Well, I did ultimately build a a modernist house in 2010, which I'm living in right now in Durham, North Carolina. I don't have a favorite architect as such, although I do admire certain ones, of course, But I do have a kind of style that tends to come back and resonate with a lot of people, and that is the the small, modest house. We're talking something under 2,000 square feet, but open and airy, you know, where the bedrooms are relatively small by today's standards. But the house lives large. It often feels much bigger than it actually is with the addition of of courtyards or atriums or skylights or a covered outdoor areas or things like that. And this is basically the the ethos of, like, the Eichler houses in California. They followed this model. These houses are are loved by the public.

B I've had so many conversations with people who grew up in these houses and just mourn not being in them anymore, particularly if they've been demolished in some way. These houses are are really what many mid century modern architects wanted to happen all across America. But as I tell people, particularly people that don't like modernism, this was never a huge thing. You know? It's still today. It's maybe one half of 1% of the housing stock, if that. And so there's there's no danger of this taking over. But the people who love it, they deeply passionately love

A it. I mean, you've given some wonderful anecdotes throughout those conversations. Do you have any other stories that really stand out to you in the evolution of your time as executive director of US Modernist?

B Oh, sure. Well, one of the projects that I worked on was helping a preservation group in Wichita. It wasn't a house. It was an arena. And it was one of these beautiful sixties arena performing arts centers that was done, I think, around '65 or '66 as part of downtown revitalization. That was a phrase that got thrown about a lot during that time. They built this performing arts center, and they built a, central library right next to it. And thanks to, one woman in Wichita who really took on this, I helped advise this group on how to go about getting public support for saving the building, and they were ultimately successful.

B It was really my honor to fly out there last year and and give a talk in the building, which had just gotten a brand new roof. And now they're turning their attention to saving this brutalist library next door, which is which is gorgeous, but has a lot of roof leaks that need to be addressed. That was one of the issues of the construction materials of the time, is it just wasn't very, watertight. We didn't have a lot of rubber membrane roofs at that era. They came along more in the seventies and solved a lot of the leaky roof problems that had existed before. Most recently, late in '23, early '20 '4, we found out about a George Matsumoto house in Raleigh, fairly well known, that had been bought by a couple, and they had pulled a demolition permit on it, and it was gonna go away. So we do we always do. We spread the word that, hey.

B A house is about to come down. And in this case, another couple stepped up and said, we'd like to move it. So in cooperation with the people that had just bought it, they arranged at five in the morning, one cold night with police escort and bucket trucks to move the power lines and newspaper reporters and just onlookers, move the house seven miles to a new location nicely next to another gorgeous mid century modern house. So they'll be right together. They could not move the entire Matsumoto house. I think they could only move, like, half of it, two thirds of it. But they're able to find the plans, so they're gonna recreate what they couldn't move on the new site. And we'll be having kind of grand opening event there in April.

A Oh, that's amazing. My head's wondering what the general public thought about these individuals who are paying all this money just to move the house seven miles down.

B Well, they're they're they're dedicated.

A Yes. Yes. Obviously.

B It's it's not for the meek. I mean, it's nothing is ever gonna be as easy as walking down to your local developer who has 35 houses for sale, picking one, getting a mortgage, going home. Nothing can beat that. But if you really are interested in preserving a house, you can you can move one. You can buy one and fix it up. You know, we've even helped people rent them. Like, where an owner is struggling with what to do with a house, you can make arrangements where the renter comes in. And in exchange for some of the rent, they can be fixing things.

B They can be, you know, bringing some of the life back into the house so it doesn't deteriorate as fast. You know, people talk to me all the time. They wanna grumble about developers. I think that for for houses, they're not the real enemy. The real enemy is vacancy. Once you let a house go vacant, it has all kinds of problems that accelerate very quickly. So if you own a house and say it belongs to your parents and they pass away, the best thing you can do is get a renter in there right away. Someone who's there looking after the house, making sure that the pipes don't burst, making sure that the, you know, squirrels don't get in, all that kind of, you know, major stuff.

B And also just keeping breathing life in the house.

A So a lot of the listeners on Practice Disrupted, I would say, are relatively new firm owners or older owners that are really invested and interested in what the next iteration of practice looks like. But we also had a lot of younger listeners, I think, that are entering in the field or trying to figure out what their career path is. What, if any, advice do you have for the future generation of architects when it comes to finding the own style that they want to inhibit and how US Modernists may be able to support them?

B Well, sure. I mean, if you're in your own practice and you're worried about getting more clients, a lot of architects don't figure out that if you wanna go fishing, where are you gonna get more fish? Are you gonna get it at a beautiful lake, or are you gonna go to the bait store, which is like going to an AIA meeting? And and people continually choose the bait store because it's easy, and they know everybody there, and they don't have to worry about rejection. But architects should be figuring out, like, who are the people that are moving into my area? Where do they hang out? What do they belong to? Our events nationally and also within North Carolina for the architects and designers and builders and landscape architects show up. It's great because they got a room full of people who are already interested in what they do and wanna talk to them and ask good questions. I think architects should attend as many public tours of things as they want because that's where all the clients are too. It's just amazing that, you know, if you start going where the fish are, they will bite.

A Hi, disruptors. Thank you for joining us today on an episode of Practice Disrupted. If you like the content for today's show, you can find all of our past episodes over on practiceofarchitecture.com/podcast. Be a part of the conversation by joining me, our speakers, and other disruptors in our community at practiceofarchitecture.com/community. Our social media handle is practice of arch. That's practice of a r c h, we'd love to hear from you. So feel free to drop us a DM and say hello. Tune in next week for a new conversation on change in the profession.