Maurice K. Smith

Who is Maurice K. Smith?

Maurice Smith is a New Zealand born architect and architectural educator. Smith's work and teaching builds upon the idea of creating "habitable three-dimensional fields" as a working method for his projects. His 'field theory' has parallels to the work of Charles Olson, William Carlos Williams, and Francis Ponge in poetry, and of György Kepes and Paul Klee in the visual arts. Smith's published works include the offices of Firth Concrete, Hastings, New Zealand, 1958, Indian_Hill_House in Groton, Massachusetts, and Blackman House in Manchester-by-the-Sea,_Massachusetts . He left New Zealand to study at MIT in the USA on a Fulbright Scholarship in 1952. During this time Smith studied under, and worked for, various MIT faculty and visiting faculty, including Carl Koch, Serge Chermayeff, Richard Buckminster Fuller, and György Kepes.

Back in New Zealand in the mid-1950s, Smith designed a number of small buildings, including individual houses in Auckland and the Firth Offices in Hastings, before returning to the US in 1958. There he taught from 1958 to 1996 at the School of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.