Ted Smith and Kathy McCormick

The RED office is the successor company augmenting and expanding the 40 year practice of Smith and Others Architects. Principals Ted Smith and Kathleen McCormick have been joined by graduates of Woodbury University’s masters in Real Estate development program (Mred), experienced  San Diego practitioners, and fellow Woodbury faculty. The team has accomplished a wide range of unusual housing projects acting as developer, architect, and contractors. These projects include, the Upas Street Houses where three single-family homes in a downtown infill site were offered for sale without interior partitioning, allowing the buyers rather than the developers to determine the layout. In Del Mar, the company built six loft houses in a string of buildings over a six year period, separating the commercial and residential zones. Each house, called a GoHome, contains six suites and provides some of San Diego’s most affordable market rate ownership and rents. In 1989, the firm developed an early San Diego example of the eastern prototype, the Row House, on Cortez Hill. The project, the Richman-Poorman Building mixes affordable “GoHomes”, with luxury town houses. In 1997 the firm developed new housing in Little Italy as a member of a team of architects and developers who divided the status quo full block development into small parcels. The project, an RFP for a housing demonstration block sponsored by the Centre City Development Corporation, combines row houses, subsidized family housing and market rate affordable lofts, all surrounding an open space in the block center. Essex Lofts, a forty-unit apartment building that proposes an alternate strategy for middle density housing eliminating underground garages and interior hallways by parking on the roof was constructed in 2002.  The RED Office is currently planning a rejuvenation project in Barrio Logan, near Chicano Park below the Coronado Bridge, where nine architects have purchases individual lots in a coordinated effort to demonstrate the merits of small-scale infill development.  RED office partner Hector Perez, has completed the first project, La Esquina and RED partner Joe Cordelle is concurrently  submitting his Barrio Logan project to the coastal commission. The neighborhood is already on the rise.  

In 2005 Smith initiated the new graduate program to teach development strategies to architects at Woodbury University. In 2008, the work of Smith and Others was exhibited in the Venice Biennale as a small part of the US Pavilion. Most recently the partners have completed a glass house in a Hillcrest canyon and a new restaurant in Little Italy. Currently the firm is developing a micro unit tower in San Diego based on an alternative design Smith and Others exhibited in the City Museum of New York as a part of the exhibit “ Making Room, Models for Housing New Yorkers”