All in The Family: Architectural DNA

By Laura Raskin, Architectural Record

May 2012

Architects beget architects, so it seems. Eliel Saarinen had Eero Saarinen. Two of Frank Lloyd Wright’s sons, Lloyd and John, became architects. Walter Gropius’s father was an architect. And if not begotten, then nearly so: Maya Lin’s architect aunt, Lin Huiyin, helped conduct the first comprehensive study of architecture in China. Charles Eames was the nephew of architect William Eames. Henry Smith-Miller, of Smith-Miller + Hawkinson Architects, could (and perhaps should) write a book about his family of architects, which stretches back, with baroque twists and turns, to Silas Smith, an engineer and carpenter who left for Chile after the Civil War. Smith-Miller discovered this history after his architect father’s death. “My father was extremely progressive. He thought family history was totally unimportant,” he says. More …