We first heard about the Smiley Building from an artist friend* in Durango, a southwest Colorado town with over 6,500 feet of elevation, under 20,000 people, and a vibrant downtown. The Smiley is a landmark junior high school designed by Colorado Springs architect Charles Thomas and built in 1936 with funding from the Federal Government's Works Progress Administration. 
The school was named for Emory Smiley, a school superintendent very popular with students. Smiley resisted having a school named after him, but he lost that argument. The school served as a junior high for 25 years, converted to a high school 25 years later, and the school district moved its programs to another school sixty years after the school was designed. That meant the historic structure was suddenly quiet and vacant…
But not for long. Local brothers Charles and John Shaw, along with Charles' wife Lisa Bodwalk, proposed conversion to a community center with a cafe, gallery space and artists' studios, and the school district sold them the building in 1997. The Smiley Studios nonprofit soon got to work with hundreds of community volunteers on repairing damage on the 45,000 square foot structure, setting up a window restoration shop in the basement after receiving a grant in 1999. The Shaws provided supervision and much of the labor on the windows. In 2001 another grant funded a historic restoration study by Atkinson-Noland & Associates of Boulder, addressing brick masonry restoration.
The new owners also focused on making the complex energy efficient and self-sustaining, installing a large array of PV cells on the building and over the parking walkway, and drilling 20 new wells to power ground-source heat pumps that provide winter heating as well as summer cooling. In 2008, the Smiley Building was awarded the Colorado Governor's Excellence in Renewable Energy Award as a pioneering carbon-free energy project.
Along with the building restoration and energy projects, the exterior received some artistic attention. These murals, in the spirit of WPA-era public art, were produced by artist Brad Goodell and dedicated in 2025...
On a recent afternoon, the Smiley is busy inside. You can order a coffee and a pastry at the Smiley Café, check email or just people watch. Along with artists' studios and apartments, the building houses dance studios, nonprofit offices, a greenhouse and 2 schools...
Along with the ArtRoom Collective, a big artists' work space with individual studios for producing and displaying art ranging in size from jewelry to wall-size paintings. Note how windows left over from the restoration program are used to define each artist's space...
At a time when green energy projects, and anything involving community infrastructure, are seeing reversals by the Federal Government, it's encouraging to see that a project motivated by those interests has saved a historic building, given it new life, and provided a vital meeting place for the community.
And in an era when corporations (and at least one politician) put their names on buildings they didn't build, it's reassuring that the owners and the team of volunteers who worked so hard rescuing this building have decided to leave Emory Smiley's name on it, as a way of remembering a public servant who never wanted his name on anything...
*Many thanks to Durango artist and jewelry maker Jennifer Floyd of Cartwheel Studio, who introduced us to the Smiley Building.
Photo Credits:
All photos are by the author.
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