Award-winning architect left Modernist imprint across the Southland

Wayne R. Williams, an award-winning Modernist architect who made his mark in post-World War II Southern California by collaborating on residential, commercial and land-use designs with partner Whitney R. Smith, has died. He was 88.

A fellow of the American Institute of Architects, Williams died Nov. 27 at a nursing home in Leesburg, Va., his family said. He had been in poor health for several months.

Smith and Williams began working together in 1946 and three years later formed a partnership that lasted until 1973. They designed hundreds of houses and commercial structures, most using the post-and-beam construction made possible with the introduction of new building materials after the war.

Among their noteworthy home designs were those for the Mutual Housing Assn. Community in Brentwood that they worked on with A. Quincy Jones, another prominent Los Angeles architect, Edgardo Contini and James Charlton. The tract of custom homes won an Honor Award from the Southern California and the Pasadena and Foothill chapters of the American Institute of Architects in 1951 and an Award of Merit from the National AIA in 1952.

In many of their residential plans, Smith and Williams fused indoors and outdoors by using large panes of glass and extending stained wooden beams and floor materials beyond the threshold of entryways, which also served to expose structural details as design elements. They would place a free-standing fireplace, open on both sides, in the middle of a large space in order to divide the area into two rooms and provide some privacy while maintaining an open floor plan. All of this, along with their creative use of wood inside the home, was intended to improve the living environment.

“There’s so much chaos and confusion in the outside world today that a person has a right to peace in his own home,” Williams said in a 1957 Time magazine article.

Architectural photographer Julius Shulman documented many of Smith and Williams’ private homes and public works in Southern California and noted the partners’ easy working relationships with clients.

“Their work was instrumental in bringing architecture down to earth, to the level of the average client,” Shulman said in a Times interview. “But they didn’t beat their drums loud enough; that’s why they didn’t become world-famous.”

The mid-century modern building they designed to house the firm’s offices on Fair Oaks Avenue in South Pasadena displayed their hallmarks: clean lines, large glass windows and exposed steel beams, accentuated by a vaulted roof covered with a lacy metal mesh screen. The structure wraps around a shaded patio with lush landscaping and redwood benches.

Smith and Williams received the Award of Excellence from the Pasadena and Foothill chapter of the AIA in 1959 for the design. The AIA’s Southern California chapter called it one of the most significant examples of Los Angeles architecture constructed between 1947 and 1967.

The partners’ innovative commercial designs can also be seen in the 1965 Friend Paper Co. on Green Street in Pasadena, a mid-century modern building with walls of glass topped by an accordion-pleated metal roof, and their 1956 Mobil gas station on Harbor Boulevard in Anaheim, with its futuristic feel and soaring simplicity.

The firm also drew up the master plans for Mission Bay Park in San Diego and California City in Kern County.

Wayne Richard Williams was born in Los Angeles in 1919 and studied architecture at USC, but his education was interrupted by World War II. He designed hangars and military facilities while in the Army. Upon his discharge, he completed his bachelor’s degree at USC, where he studied under Smith before they formed their successful partnership.

Williams continued to practice architecture after Smith left the firm in 1973. In recent years he had designed large-scale commercial and residential projects for Giuseppe Cecchi’s International Developers Inc. in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C. Williams and his wife, Paula, moved to Virginia in 2003.

In addition to his wife, Williams is survived by sons Garth, Rhys and Keith.

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claire.noland@latimes.com