We recently connected with Tim Rhodes and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Tim, thanks for joining us today. Are you happier as a creative? Do you sometimes think about what it would be like to just have a regular job? Can you talk to us about how you think through these emotions?

Being an Architect, designing space and really impacting people’s lives is a dream job. After years of doing “regular” jobs and earning an architectural degree in commercial kitchens, the experience of working for myself lent each day both the joy of creating and the terror of remaining calm in the reality of having to earn a living from my creativity and ability to connect deeply with people.

As a kid, my parents tell me, I built vast cities of blocks on the living room carpet. My best efforts growing up, and the times I really felt “seen” were artistic. My high school rock band was less successful than the promotional posters I created to attract listeners to our gigs. The idea of making a living from creative work was always intriguing to me yet actually paying the rent with ideas was daunting.

My first jobs, in kitchens, got me through school and university and gave me a background in cooking and food preparation that I still rely on today in designing kitchen spaces. And the wear-and-tear and grubbiness of being immersed in food was a strong incentive to stay in college and work toward a creative degree that would take me away from hard labor in restaurants. In my fifth year of architecture school I was offered an internship and went to work, for the first time, earning a paycheck by drawing. There was limited creativity yet the ability to trade drawings and ideas for manual labor and begin to find my calling in design was incredibly freeing. I worked for ten years for other architects (“regular” jobs) and for years after starting my own firm, thirty years ago, I would dream at night of having returned to a job working for someone else. The ability to be on my own, which arrived unexpectedly when I was laid off of a “regular” job in architecture, was both freeing and exciting and required me to find ways to pay the bills through creative work.

After the early years I never looked back nor wanted a regular job. Having freedom to create as I wanted and in “real time” with real clients was a dream. The anxiety of meeting the, often unstated, desires of a boss was gone-replaced with the anxiety of bringing in enough compensation from myriad small projects (the design of houses but also kitchens, bathrooms, playspaces, additions) was incredibly energizing even as I struggled. Having my name on design work meant that I was both compensated with recognition and the ability to create as I wanted, and that I was completely and totally responsible for everything I did.

Tim, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My name is Tim Rhodes. I am an Architect in Seattle, founder of Rhodes Architecture + Light, a thirty-year-old architecture, interiors and planning firm creating buildings and spaces in which families, communities and businesses thrive. I work with a young team of architects and associates to provide space, light, green space and landscapes in the Pacific Northwest.

As a child I created cities in the living room, painted, assembled collages of natural materials and learned sculpture, printmaking and drawing. My parents, a writer and a teacher, supported my art and I found a deep love of design and the creation of things. I was always curious about how materials, systems, machines and the natural systems of the world worked. Design released me to express myself, suspending time and allowing me to be “seen”. I spent summers as a young teen in a university-level art program with masters level students teaching me materials, painting and drawing and in museums in the midwest looking at painting, sculpture, metalwork and collage. Building my own spaces as a kid was a refuge from the family struggles I was raised with as well, lending privacy and security in creations I built and controlled.

My first majors in college, psychology and philosophy, were intriguing but dry compared to the art I was learning. My first architecture experience was a fantastic design course taught by the Austrian industrial designer Victor Papanek, a renaissance man and early practitioner of design emphasizing a concern for cultures, sustainability and the natural environment. Victor taught the use of mundane materials on small budgets for a myriad of cultures needing problems solved. The capstone project that winter was an assignment to design four scales, weighing devices, for four randomly-assigned cultures (I drew the US, Japan, Tanzania and Bali) using materials readily available in those locations. The design required a deep understanding of each culture and communities, available natural materials and the use of components harvested from the local earth and local methods of making things, I learned the aesthetics of objects that would appeal to varied cultures and that objects have a deeper purpose as well as an appearance.

Rhodes Architecture + Light was started after I was caught in a cycle of layoffs standard in the architecture business in 1995. My daughter and first child was born at the same time, giving me a strong incentive to learn to make a living at design on my own.

After thirty years of creating nurturing space for many people, it is still the people and the relationships that make me happy as an artist and creative. Seeing the spaces we design at Rhodes Architecture + Light actually raised into the air and then watching the next generation of children grow and play in them (and learn about and maybe become Architects?) is the best reason to keep creating and finding ways to design new space. We emphasize community through connections to natural places and flora for gathering outdoors and the creation of ways for buildings to open and join the green spaces. Our firm name contains “light”; we introduce both natural light (“daylighting”) and “manufactured” lighting as a crucial element in our architecture, focusing our design and client’s input on great illumination. And we create spaces that open to each other to lend places for families and communities to meet, accenting, and allowing places for, the interactions of the human beings whose lives play out in our spaces.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

My journey with Rhodes Architecture + Light has been happenstance; meeting and liaising with “average people” who needed design to create space and aesthetics. The creative process, working closely and collaborating with the people who came through the doors of our offices, provided lessons in what they needed, how to talk about and present creative work, and eventually how to build deeper meaning into the architecture impacting, daily, their lives.

I found that most people seeking architecture understood that they were trying to solve problems and build space. The realization that people also sought kind, calm, nurturing spaces in which to live but did not know to ask for them, illuminated a higher, more intriguing mission in architecture. Buildings and spaces can be completely utilitarian, serving pragmatic functions only. What makes architecture a joy and a pleasure to create is the underlying stories that users tell if asked and the way those stories can support more complex, deeper meaning in our spaces.

A client who is also an artist may strive for good space, openness allowing viewing her art, and good functional lighting, for example, but also deeply desire that the painting, collage and sculpture she has chosen to enrich her environment with is expressed as part of the space. We designed a gallery-home for a local (Seattle) fine artist who wanted to display two 2000-pound granite Korean “grave minders”, big heavy sculpture she called “the scholars” that held great meaning for her. The immediate tendency was to locate these sculpture in the background, to be viewed from afar. We modeled the sculpture and illustrated the use of the two “scholars” in a dialogue with each other, located as space dividers, making their impact more visceral as viewers had to actually interact with them. The art was moved to the center of the space and became a daily part of the lives of the family, friends and community using the home as a result.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

Architecture, incorporating all of the other arts, constantly rewards me. The fact that the art of architecture is multi-dimensional means that people’s lives are impacted by it daily, that it is seen and felt from all sides, and that it becomes a place to live as well as something to surprise and challenge the user. In architecture school most of us learned the practice though of our creations as objects, to be perfected and viewed from the outside as sculpture (I did).

Years of creating buildings and then walking them and seeing people and community use them began to teach me that the space inhabited is more important than the form of the building. Adding deep explorations of materials and lighting and then collaborations with the landscape, the natural world, drove the rewarding realization that it is in moving through, sitting quietly in, and engaging others in spaces, that the architecture transcends any sculpture to become experienced and nurturing places. We are most rewarded when a user of our spaces describes the surprise and delight in waking up and going about an average morning in the well-lit places we have dreamed up.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.rhodesarchitecture.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rhodesarchitecture/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rhodes.archandlight
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/rhodes-architecture-light/
• Other: Houzz.com:

  https://www.houzz.com/pro/rhodesarch/__public

Image Credits

Cheryl McIntosh, Photographer