From drawing to building her own tree house and forts, Sylvia Smith worked well with her hands growing up in suburban Chicago in the 1960s. “I was interested in making things from early on,” says the partner emerita at FX Collaborative. “My mother would say ‘unladylike things,’ but I loved putting things together. I like the logic of understanding, then questioning, ‘Could you do it another way?’”

After studying fine arts and history at Dickenson College in Carlisle, Pa., Smith landed at the University of Virginia graduate school for architecture and in 1982 started working for Fox & Fowle Architects, the predecessor to FXCollaborative. Unsatisfied as a high-rise designer, she was energized when the firm successfully bid to design an expanded American Craft Museum in New York City, which happened to be the subject of her school thesis project. “I was in the partner’s office so fast when they announced this project,” Smith recalls of advocating to work on the project for what is now the Museum of Arts and Design.

That job set her career on a new course that led to a series of other culture sector projects and ultimately, about 15 years later, to her forming what would become an award-winning cultural and educational studio focused on program-intensive projects. It was also the Brooklyn-based firm’s first group dedicated to one sector. Smith hired her own team focused on “cultural and educational program-driven projects,” she says. The team shaped institutions from the U.S. to Africa, helping to set sustainability standards before the industry began to uniformly embrace environmental responsibility. Her projects include The Statue of Liberty Museum and Children’s Museum of Manhattan.

Smith, 73, was elevated to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects in 2008 and won the AIA New York State Fellows Award in 2013. She earned the Pillar Award from the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation in 2019, three years before being featured in The Women Who Changed Architecture, published by Princeton Architectural Press. “She leads with passion, integrity, vulnerability and love,” Austin Sakong, design director at FX Collaborative, said in a statement announcing Smith’s retirement. “We have no better model of what it is to be an architect, in the deepest sense of that word.”

Smith’s design for the Wildlife Conservation Society Center for Global Conservation includes a three-story form that bridges two rock outcroppings, nestling the structure into the Bronx Zoo campus.
Photo by David Sundberg/Esto, courtesy FXCollaborative 

Ms. Smith Goes to New York

After graduate school, Smith designed two homes in Virginia and even worked on the construction crew when one was built, learning how to collaborate with contractors and respect “what it takes to make a building come together.”

She joined Fox & Fowle in 1982 and became a partner 14 years later. One of the few women working at a major New York City architecture firm, Smith found that clients would often address her male colleagues in meetings even if she was the project architect.

Despite feeling “uncomfortable” being the only woman in the room, Smith adapted. “It just wasn’t my style to give up,” she says, noting that her sports knowledge allowed her to scan the New York Times sports section for conversational material with her male colleagues and clients about local teams. “Engineers would invite me to Knicks games,” she says, while contractors “would invite me to Yankee games, and you just got to know people outside of the professional arena.

Smith mentored countless women architects—some of whom told her they would have struggled to acquiesce to male-dominated workplace culture. “They thought I adapted too much to the circumstance at the time,” Smith says.

Seeing herself as an “old school” architect with a “capital A,” Smith takes a slightly less gendered view, especially when it comes to the lack of work-life balance afforded to her generation of career women.

“I’m an architect,” she says. “That influences everything that I do. It’s how I see the world. If you want to succeed and go places or develop ideas that haven’t been done before, you have to go the extra mile. I applaud the fact that there are more options [today], but my shoulder was in it.”

Smith did find a strong woman mentor in the late architect pioneer Beverly Willis, who ran her own firm and founded the foundation named for her. Willis taught Smith to not just mentor women but also to advocate for their advancement. Sometimes when the firm’s male partners considered promotions, “the list would look like others [in the room], I’d just try to say with some humor, ‘Does anybody notice anything about this list?’”

Trendsetter

pioneered sustainable practices long before LEED certification became an industry standard, incorporating sustainable design on two buildings for the Black Rock Forest Center for Science and Education in Orange County, N.Y., in the 1990s. The work was rooted in her experience teaching home design courses at the Yestermorrow Design Build School in Warren, Vt., in the 1980s and 1990s during her summer vacations.

The school developed sustainable building standards that Smith refined for her FXCollaborative practice. While those early sustainable principles included “basic ideas” of building orientation and staggered-stud walls to improve insulation, she also deployed specialized modular roof panels, composting toilets and geothermal heating and cooling.

At the Bronx Zoo, she led renovation of the Lion House, which became New York City’s first LEED Gold landmark. The adaptive reuse project transformed the zoo’s largest historic Beaux-Arts building into a modern, energy-efficient immersive exhibit.

“Sylvia worked with us to restore the historic building with respect and led a team to help us use space efficiently,” says Susan Chin, Wildlife Conservation Society senior vice president of strategy and advancement for zoos and aquariums. “Return ducts became baobab trees where birds could perch, a column was deliberately designed to lean slightly so it became a spiny tree in the forest. The result is an extremely complex but seamless building.”

For the Zoo’s Center for Global Conservation LEED Gold project, Smith incorporated biophilic design principles, integrating daylight and outdoor spaces.

Smith also led sustainable renovations for Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, SUNY Purchase College and Pace University—each requiring her to maintain project schedules while balancing stakeholder consensus. She took sustainability a step further at the David Rockefeller Creative Arts Center, achieving LEED Platinum and net-zero energy performance on a modern adaptive reuse project.

Judy Clark, former executive director of the Pocantico Center of Rockefeller Brothers Fund, wrote Smith to say that building the center was the highlight of her career. “It is a wonderful facility, very much your vision, and has enhanced the campus beyond words, offering a wide range of cultural opportunities for the enjoyment and education of the surrounding community and larger public,” Clark wrote.

Smith—a 20-year Dickenson College trustee and chair of its facilities committee who guided efforts to blend historic preservation with modern campus needs—still advises the school on projects. She enjoys helping “a place that gave me so much” to optimize funding while reflecting school ideals in its built environment.

“Architects sometimes get too caught up in the object of architecture and [its] mechanics,” Smith says. “In a way, we’re ambassadors to the built environment ... making people celebrate place and how buildings contribute to that. They don’t have to break the bank on the budget or be designed by a bold-faced name. They can be thoughtful insertions into an environment. That’s been important to me.”