The Architect of Landscapes Born in Jamestown in 1840, Mortimer L. Smith lived a life defined by the precision of the drafted line and the softness of the painted horizon. While history often remembers him through the structures he helped shape, his hand was equally at work capturing the quietude of the natural world. He moved to Detroit in 1855, a period that would see him evolve from a student of the arts into a significant figure in the city's developing cultural landscape. His dual identity as an architect and a painter allowed him to view the world through a lens of both structural inte…