Stanley Albert Smith was born in Brookville, Kansas November 25, 1889. He attended Kansas State College where he earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1913, and immediately became an instructor at the college from 1913 to 1920. Smith held professor positions at several universities, including North Dakota Agricultural College (later NDSU), 1920-1923, and the State College of Washington (WSC, later Washington State University), 1923-1955.
While at WSC, Smith was the Head of the Department of Architectural Engineering and the second University Architect, from 1923-1947. While University Architect, he completed fourteen major buildings and fraternity houses. These included: Commons Hall, Duncan Dunn Hall, Bohler Gymnasium, Troy Hall, Hollingbery Field House, Honors Hall, Washington Building, Smith Gymnasium, the Mechanical Engineering Laboratory, the Central Steam Plant, Waller Hall, Wilmer-Davis Hall, Pine Manor, and L. J. Smith Hall (Smith Agricultural Engineering Building)." In 1947, the increased load of building work at WSC, Smith resigned as University Architect and concentrated on his position as Head of the Department of Architectural Engineering.
Additionally, Smith took on projects for private homes and commercial buildings in and around the town of Pullman. Many of these projects, both on and off campus, were undertaken by Smith’s private practices: Smith & Rounds in the 1920s during which Fred G. Rounds, an assistant professor of architecture at WSC, worked as Smith’s partner, and Smith & Weller in the 1930s during which Harry C. Weller, also architectural engineering faculty at WSC, worked as Smith’s partner. Occasionally during the 1930s, Smith and Rounds continued to collaborate on projects, including the addition to Pullman High School in the 1930s. This project was undertaken in part through a Public Works Administration [PWA] grant. The addition to the high school was carried out from 1933-1934, less than a year after the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act which created the PWA.
Following his position at WSC, Smith became the architectural advisor to the Ataturk University Development Committee in Erzurum, Turkey, which in turn advised the Turkish Ministry of Education in the planning of the new university. This development was a joint Turkish-American effort to strengthen education and research in Turkey at the university level at Ankara University and Ataturk University. In 1954 the University of Nebraska was asked to assist with this effort under the university's Agency for International Development (A.I.D.) contract.
The collection consists of glass lantern slides depicting photographs plans/drawings of historical buildings of the Pacific Northwest. Glass lantern slides are 3¼"x4" positive glass transparencies, generally intended for projection onto a screen. The slides were apparently intended for instructional use for architecture students. It is unclear how many are reproductions of others' images, and how many are "original" images. The series are comprised of, in order, Pullman materials, a series of mission slides, some materials on commercial buildings and a fort, a series of Seattle-based housing slides (ca. 1940-1941), and finally a few images related to a Buckminster Fuller Dymaxion House.
Based on notes and identifying call numbers written on the slides, we suspect these were once held as instructional materials in the departmental Architecture Library in WSU's Carpenter Hall. A significant number of them are drawn from the work of Stanley A. Smith, WSC's University Architect from 1923 to 1947, but we can't be certain if all of these come from him. Smith is known to have taken photographs and drawings of missions in the region, so many of those, at least, are potentially unique to this collection. Though he apparently never published from them, in December of 1935 Smith did present on campus (complete with illustrated slides) on the history of the Cataldo Mission.
With some slight tweaking, materials are arranged in an order which matches the call numbers hand-written on the slides. This results in a loose subject-based order of several series and subseries.
This collection is open and available for research use.
Copyright restrictions apply.
[Item description]
State College of Washington Department of Architectural Engineering Lantern Slides, 1927-1941 (PC 25)
Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, Washington State University Libraries, Pullman, WA.
The glass lantern slides in this collection were received at Washington State University Libraries' Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections (MASC) at some point in time prior to 2001. They were initially retained without an accession number, and were finally processed in July 2017 by University Archivist Mark O'English. In March of 2018, six slides from Stanley Smith came to MASC via the former architecture chair Dave Scott (UPC 18-02) and were added to the collection.
Sometime after receipt, the glass slides were housed individually in paper sleeves, which were annotated with information (often incorrect) copied from the slides. This is the second MASC collection identified as PC 25 – the earlier PC 25, "Additional Glass Negatives, ca. 1901-1920" was incorporated into PC 23 in 2017.
Stanley A. Smith Papers, 1954-1963
Stanley A. Smith Papers, circa 1900-1946
Stanley A. Smith Papers, 1924-1943
A. E. Drucker House Architectural Drawings, 1927-1928
Stanley A. Smith Oral History Interview, 1960 October
State College of Washington University Architect Records, 1923-1956
This collection is indexed under the following headings in the online catalog. Researchers desiring materials about related topics, persons, or places should search the catalog using these headings.