About
Jack Smith is President of Smith Associates, an architecture and planning firm based in Ketchum, Idaho and Livingston, Montana. He holds a Doctorate Degree in architecture and is board certified by the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards. He is currently a registered architect in ten states. He is a Fellow of the prestigious College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects. He was elevated to Fellow in 1996 in the category of design, “for notable contributions to the aesthetic, scientific and practical efficiency of architecture.” Dr. Smith has practiced in the architectural community for five decades. His portfolio spans a large geographical area including the United States, Canada and New Zealand.
Early in his career, Smith served a long apprenticeship with John Sugden, a Mies van der Rohe protégé. Through this mentorship he gained a strong discipline in design and meticulous attention to detail. He is well versed and qualified in projects of diverse scales, typologies and regions including resorts, urban and rural land planning, commercial, institutional, and residential architecture. He has also performed several environmentally sensitive land use studies.
Before establishing private practice in Idaho in 1974, Smith was founding Partner and President of Enteleki, Architecture, Planning, Research; a firm of 75 people with offices in San Francisco, California and Salt Lake City, Utah. While at Enteleki, and as a member of the Snowbird Design Group, he was one of the original architects and planners of the Snowbird Recreation Area in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah. Today, Snowbird Resort remains one of America’s great year round resort destinations.
In the mid to late sixties and early seventies, Jack Smith was in partnership with Dan Kiley, the internationally celebrated landscape architect, based in Charlotte, Vermont, working in the fields of architecture, site planning, landscape architecture and environmental studies. During his tenure there he was partner in charge of several projects including land use studies involving 1,000 square miles in central Maine and 250 square miles in Vermont. He was also partner in charge of four high-rise office complexes in the urban core of Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
It was said of Smith in 1995 by Mr. Allan Temko, author and Pulitzer Prize winning architectural critic for The San Francisco Chronicle, “When one sees his work in California and elsewhere, perfectly at home in different terrains, it is clear that he is not primarily a regional architect, but a far reaching designer of national and even international outlook, including a long glance at Japan, who responds to the needs of specific sites and communities with rare sensitivity and grace.”
Smith did his undergraduate studies in architecture at the University of Utah from 1949 to 1953, where he returned to teach design from 1964 to 1967. Since then he has maintained his interest in academics by teaching and lecturing at various colleges and universities nationally, while maintaining an active architectural practice. He was named Distinguished Practitioner Fellow at the University of Utah Center for Architectural Studies in 1995 and Affiliate Professor of Architecture at the University of Idaho in 1999. He has recently returned to full time practice after retiring from Montana State University School of Architecture where he was a full time teaching professor from 2006 to 2020.
Through the years, The American Institute of Architects, The American Society of Landscape Architects and other institutions have recognized Dr. Smith for his achievements with more than thirty design awards. His work has been published in journals, magazines, films and books, including Time Magazine; Architectural Record; Architectural Forum; Process Architecture; Dan Kiley, America’s Master Landscape Architect; The Mountain House; Kidder-Parker; Design for Mountain Communities; Designing Idaho; American Ski Resorts, Architecture, Style, Experience.
Mentors
Dan Kiley, Landscape Architect
John W. Sugden, Architect, FAIA
Anna Campbell Bliss, Fellow of the American Academy in Rome