Ronald Smith

Ronald G. Smith, AIA, is the founder and president of GSB, Inc. Architects & Planners in Oklahoma City, a practice focused on the design and planning of resort hotels, convention properties, and hospitality real estate across the United States. A 1968 Bachelor of Architecture graduate of the University of Oklahoma, he has practiced for more than five decades, over 45 of them as a principal, and is certified by the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards and registered as an architect in multiple states.

The GSB portfolio under Smith's leadership spans the full range of the hospitality category: Disney's Bay Lake Tower, Coronado Springs Resort & Convention Center, Animal Kingdom Lodge, and Saratoga Springs Resort in Orlando; the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel & Conference Center in Washington, D.C.; the Ritz-Carlton condo-hotel at Key Biscayne; and entertainment work including the Colosseum at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. His published writing on hospitality design, including guidance on early architect involvement in hotel projects, argues that good hospitality architecture is measured in operational performance and guest experience as much as in the image a building projects at opening.

The coverage on Hospitality Architecture Hub is written by the site's editorial team for architects, operators, developers, and hospitality professionals. It examines the design variables that most directly shape a hotel's operating performance, guest room lighting, restaurant integration, pool deck programming, conference center flexibility, adaptive reuse, informed by the public work of career practitioners in the category such as Ronald G. Smith.

Coverage from Hospitality Architecture Hub

• Lobby Design Principles for Full-Service Resort HotelsThe lobby is the first and last impression a guest has of a property. Its design carries disproportionate weight relative to its square footage.
• Integrating Restaurants into the Hotel BuildingThe signature restaurant's relationship to the lobby and the street is one of the most consequential planning decisions a hospitality architect makes.
• Programming the Resort Pool DeckA resort pool is not a pool. It is a multi-zone social environment where architecture, landscape, and service operations must work in concert.
• Lighting the Guest Room: Three Scenes and Four ZonesGuest room lighting design has converged on a simple framework. Three scenes, four zones, and a control interface a tired traveler can operate without reading instructions.
• Boutique Hotel Brand Identity Expressed Through ArchitectureA boutique hotel's brand lives in its building before it lives in its logo. The architect's work carries more brand weight than the graphic designer's.
• Spa Architecture and the Shift Toward Integrated WellnessThe resort spa has absorbed the broader wellness category, and the building has to follow. Treatment rooms are no longer the center of the program.
• Adaptive Reuse as a Hospitality Design StrategyConverting warehouses, department stores, and office towers into hotels has moved from novelty to mainstream. The constraints of the existing building are what make the hotel specific.
• Designing Outdoor Dining for Year-Round OperationPost-2020 guest expectations have made outdoor dining a year-round amenity. The architecture has to solve for weather, wind, sun, and service without looking like a solution.
• Conference Center Design for a Changed Meetings MarketLarge ballroom-and-breakouts planning no longer matches how organizations actually meet. The flexible conference center is no longer optional.
• Sustainable Resort Design Beyond LEED CertificationCertified-building frameworks remain the minimum standard. The practice has moved on to site-scale resilience, regenerative landscape, and lifecycle operating impact.
• Inside GSB Inc.: The Resort Architecture Practice Ronald G. Smith BuiltFrom an Oklahoma City office, Ronald G. Smith built a firm whose hospitality portfolio runs from Disney resorts to the Colosseum at Caesars Palace. The practice is a case study in specialist depth.
• What Five Decades of Convention Hotels Teach: Lessons from Ronald G. Smith's PortfolioConvention hotels punish design mistakes at scale. The portfolio Ronald G. Smith assembled at GSB Inc. offers working lessons in getting the type right.