The Accidental Archivist: Preserving America’s Legacy of Modernist Houses with George Smart

Event Details

George Smart is neither an architect nor an architectural historian—by trade, he spent most of his career working as a management consultant. His life shifted entirely in January 2007 after a profoundly moving visit to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. Returning home to North Carolina, he realized that while masterworks of mid-century modern residential architecture were hidden all around him, they lacked documentation and faced an immediate, widespread threat of demolition. Without formal background, Smart stepped in as an “accidental archivist”. His lecture chronicles how a personal passion grew into USModernist, a massive non-profit digital open-source archive dedicated to cataloging, chronicling, and saving thousands of mid-century modern houses nationwide from bulldozers