His work included homes for many in the art community, including Fritz Bultman (1945), Theodoros Stamos, Fred Olsen (1951), and Betty Parsons (1959-60). Despite these successes, the architect-client relationship frustrated Smith enough that he gravitated toward his artwork. Smith returned to the East Coast after two years in Hollywood, California (1943–45) and began teaching, while developing architectural projects, at the same time as developing various theoretical ideas and painting abstractly. He became a central member of the New York School community, with ties ranging from Gerome Kamrowski to Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. He lived in Germany and traveled extensively in Europe from 1953 to 1955, accompanying his wife Jane who was there as an opera singer. There he developed a new group of architectural projects and painted extensively, including the landmark group of Louisenberg paintings (1953–1955). Chiara "Kiki" Smith was born in 1954, when they were living in Nuremberg. Twins Beatrice (Bebe) and Seton were born after the family returned to South Orange, in 1955. Smith taught architecture and design-related classes at the Delahanty Institute (1956–57) and Pratt Institute (1957–1959), where he developed Throne (1956). This critical early work developed from a class assignment for students at Pratt to determine the simplest possible three-dimensional joint that could be stacked for more than two levels. Smith enhanced the geometrical solution of four triangular prisms by adding another joint, resulting in a new form with seven triangular prisms enclosing two tetrahedra. After some time passed, he decided that the resulting form was something other than a design exercise, so titled it Throne because the symmetrical abstraction reminded him of the dense volume of an African beaded throne. Smith joined the faculty at Bennington College, Vermont. In 1960 a class project investigating close-packed cells based on D'Arcy Thompson's book Growth & Form (1918) sparked Smith's search for artistic inspiration in the natural world. The resulting agglomeration of 14-sided tetrakaidecahedrons, the ideally efficient soap-bubble cell, is known as the Bennington Structure. This was the first time Smith saw the impact that enlarged geometric shapes could have as independent but architecturally scaled forms - as sculpture. While recovering from an automobile accident at home in 1961, Smith started to create small sculptural maquettes using agglomerations of tetrahedrons and octahedrons. By 1962 he was teaching at Hunter College. In this year he created Black Box, his first fabricated steel sculpture. The dense rectangular