Photography by Matt Seidel
Smith describes his days as races—and he likes to start early. He’s typically out the door before 7 a.m. each day, and the first thing he likes to do is get some alone time—prioritizing his meetings for the day and week. It’s not meditation, but “a big part of setting the priorities and organizing for the week—and the day—is to understand the critical nature of all the different appointments I have. I try to be disciplined about letting my assistant book the calendar in Outlook. Sometimes when I do it, I double- or triple-book things.”
Smith prioritizes A, B, and C meetings. “An A meeting is ‘I’ve just gotta really, really have this meeting,’” he says. B meetings are important but flexible. C meetings are courtesies.
Smith has been running Lawrence Group for 36 years and has learned that there’s no better teacher than failure. A close second is business biographies, which he reads to soak up ideas on topics such as diversifying work and building high-performing teams. One that was life-changing: Connie Bruck’s Master of the Game, a biography of now-deceased Time Warner media mogul Steve Ross. “He married into a family who ran funeral homes, used the cash flow from that to grow into parking lots in New York, used the cash flow from that to buy Warner Bros., and then merged that with Time Warner,” Smith says. “That’s a little bit like what we’ve done here at Lawrence Group. We started as an architectural firm, and now we develop buildings, manage buildings, build buildings, design buildings.”
Exploring the city in the name of discovery and inspiration is all part of an architect’s job, and Smith prefers to do so on a bike. Smith owns six motorcycles, but his road bike of choice is a KTM 1190 Adventure. “In nice weather,” he says, “I’ll go around historic neighborhoods on a bike, because you can see everything so well. There are still the bones of some really interesting buildings in parts of South St. Louis.”
Smith’s work is influenced by the architecture of not only the city but also of the country and world. “I seek out not just buildings but also environments,” he says. “I think we learn a lot by seeing how other people design and build and exist and solve problems.” A recent significant source of inspiration: the Atlanta BeltLine. “The design, the development around it, the art, the public spaces and parks that are all new that have been built around it blew my top.” The Chouteau Greenway is slated to run through his City Foundry project, so Smith’s become a student of trails and food halls. He says he’s also looked to New York City’s Chelsea Market and Krog Street Market in Atlanta.
Once the workday is over, it’s time to go home and unplug. Smith and his wife are empty-nesters, so, he says, “I tell people, when I go home at night, I’m not responding unless it’s absolutely super urgent. The way I rationalize it is, anything that comes in at 7:30 at night can be responded to just as easily at 7:30 in the morning.”
If Smith doesn’t have a business dinner, he’s reading. He checks out the St. Louis Post-Dispatch the old-fashioned way—the actual newspaper. “Online, I read The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN. I have a whole news feed on my iPad. I tag the topics I want to be kept abreast of, so I can very quickly go across the different media sources.”
He reads the news to unwind? “That’s taking input, as opposed to initiating stuff,” he says. “I direct people, respond to emails, phone calls all day long. In the evening, I’m just taking it in.”
