Enduring sketches of Spain

Montecito, Calif. — FOR a place discovered by Spain, there was surprisingly little Spain in Southern California's architecture, which may be hard to imagine today when cruising parts of L.A. and San Diego and nearly all of Santa Barbara. But for the first three centuries after the Spanish reached California's shores, the only visual features that said Spain Was Here were bits of baroque church decoration -- elaborate arches and ornamental carvings, fountains and wrought iron -- incorporated into the mission buildings by the \o7padres\f7.

The homes built by the Spanish arrivals most often were simple adobes in the Mexican style. As Americans began filling up the state in the 1800s, they brought with them the building styles they knew, like architectural security blankets: simple shingled farmhouses and, for the more endowed, the Victorian or Queen Anne or Federal house. There was a movement in the late 1800s to construct public buildings that evoked the state's roots, with Southern Pacific Railroad erecting a string of train depots in the Mission Revival style throughout the state.

But almost no one thought of building "Spanish."

Today you can't escape the "Spanish" look, inspired -- good or bad -- from an architectural style that came to life in the early 1900s. Called Spanish Colonial Revival, its practitioners were familiar with Spanish Colonial buildings in Mexico, but headed in their own direction. Architect Bertram Goodhue helped start things off with the Panama-Pacific International Exposition buildings in San Diego, but was then quickly distracted by Modernism.

That Spanish Colonial Revival became a beloved architectural style is almost an accident; its most brilliant executor, George Washington Smith, falling back into the profession decades after a financial reversal led him away from it.

George Washington Smith was born on the first president's birthday -- hence his name -- in 1876 to a well-to-do Pennsylvania family. Smith went to Harvard to study architecture but dropped out after two years when his father could no longer afford it. He worked briefly at a friend's architectural firm but wasn't able to make a living. He joined a bond firm as a salesman, doing so well at it that by 1912, at the age of 36, he was able to move with his wife to Europe to study painting.