2021 Directory

41 AIA Wyoming recently sat down with architect Tim Belton from the firm Malone, Belton and Able. Getting to know a bit about him was informative and insightful, and we appreciate him sharing a brief part of himself with us. How did your childhood experiences as the son of a Foreign Service officer influence your development as an architect? I’ve lived in some truly amazing houses as I was growing up, but besides the homes, I was exposed to architectural masterpieces around the globe. I have always had great respect for architecture and the architects who create it. I remember a lot of the spaces and details in the places I lived. There’s an example of that in Santiago, Chile, where I lived between ages six and eight. When we got there in 1956, our family was told to use the embassy residence until the ambassador showed up. We found ourselves in the Palacio Bruna, built circa 1918 and designed by Chilean architect Julio Bertrand. It was of Italian Renaissance style, highly ornate and very imposing. We only lived there for three or four months, but I remember it quite well. I last lived there in 1957. The place was enormously fancy with 17 bedrooms with en suite bath. There was a servant’s stairway and a dumbwaiter with an opening on the third floor. The people who ran the house saw me as an interloper and didn’t allow me into the kitchen, so I would ride down the dumbwaiter from the third floor and sneak in for snacks. I went back to Santiago for an international AIA convention in 1996 with a few other U.S. architects and decided to visit this place I’d lived, but the U.S. government had sold the building to the Chilean Chamber of Commerce the year before. When we were there, it was 3.5 floors, but the Chamber had added to it, so it was now a full four stories, with an added guardhouse. When I presented myself at the guardhouse, the guard knew nothing about it having been the American Embassy and certainly thought I was lying about having lived there, but he let me talk to one of their tour guides. The guide was suspicious of me, too, so I told him about the servant’s stairway, and we went to the third floor where the dumbwaiter opening had been turned into a closet. I asked him to take out the stacks of paper and office supplies inside, and said he would find two rails on the back wall for the dumbwaiter. And there they were. When he saw them, he believed my story, welcoming me back. He showed me all the rooms, including the dining room with a table for 22; and one that had been my bedroom, now an office. The guide introduced me to people as we wandered through, letting me take photos. That sort of stuff influenced me from a very young age. What are your favorite places and cultures in the world? Chile was one of them. Others include Rio de Janeiro; Paris; Venice and the island of Sicily; Marrakesh; Athens and the island of Crete; Vancouver B.C.; Washington D.C.; San Francisco; Chiang Mai in Thailand; Kyoto, Japan; then circling back to South America, Cuenca in Ecuador. These are favorite places and favorite cultures. They were all fabulous then; some much changed now. When and why did you decide to be an architect? I was about 12 years old, living in Canberra, Australia, where I enjoyed making mechanical inventions and building models of ships from kits. The inventions were just my own weird things, robots and such. My dad told me building models was related to architecture, and he said I might want to think about becoming an architect. I did think about it; not seriously though, just a seed planted. Tell us about your university education at Stanford and the University of Oregon. What is urban anthropology? What was the most important thing you learned at Stanford, in Oregon or both places? Urban anthropology is a subset of cultural anthropology. It’s the study of cultural systems in cities and towns and how people relate to the built Getting to Know Tim Belton, AIA CONTINUED ON PAGE 42