Tim Perks (Nike)
BY LUKE AREHART
The next entry in the Architect’s Questionnaire series features Nike’s senior director of retail design, Tim Perks. A licensed architect in California, Tim Perks earned his bachelor of architecture degree from California College of the Arts. Approaching 15 years with Oregon’s most renowned company, Perks has served a variety of roles in the global retail design landscape, including developing retail concepts and leading the operations teams that are responsible for how Nike comes to life in wholesale retail accounts across North America.
Returning to California College of the Arts as an adjunct professor for eight years, Perks’ background and career reflect a true artist, along with the way an architectural education can prove itself invaluable across many industries and disciplines while illustrating trajectory which can inspire future students to see what is possible in the realm of architectural thinking and design.
Portland Architecture: When did you first become interested in architecture as a possible career?
Tim Perks: I’d have to go back to my childhood. My dad always wanted to be an architect when he was young, and somehow he planted that idea in me at a very young age. I went to a high school at a technical magnet school in Chicago called Lane Tech, where you actually had to choose a major when you enrolled. As a freshman in high school I chose architecture for my major. I spent two years at that school before we moved and ended up hating it. At the time the curriculum was really just menial drafting classes; there was no design aspect to it at all. I got out of that school and architecture as well. My last two years of high school were in Santa Cruz, California. I got really into painting and drawing and I spent a lot of time in art classes. I ended up being recruited by the California College of Arts and Crafts in San Francisco, as it was known at the time; it's now the Art School. The recruiter was trying to coax me to study architecture because I loved drawing and painting and I really enjoyed math. She was trying to rectify those things for me, because most of the artistic students she was recruiting probably weren’t interested in trigonometry at the same time like I was. I went off to art school thinking that I would follow a path into graphic design or illustration, and I remember thinking that I didn’t want to be an architect at all.
Where did you study architecture and how would you rate the experience?
I studied at CCAC in San Francisco and it was a great time. During my first semester, the school held an event on campus where you could go around to different rooms where there would be somebody from each of the different majors speaking and presenting about their program. At that point there were probably close to 30 different majors like painting, drawing, glass, textiles and printmaking, as well as design-related majors like industrial design. I was with some friends and remember trying to find the graphic design room. I walked into the wrong room and found myself listening to the director of research and planning, David Meckel. We stayed and listened to his presentation and learned that he worked in Charles and Ray Eames’ office. David talked about architecture as an education and about the possibilities and opportunities it opened up. The way he talked about it, compelled me to take his intro to architecture class the following semester. I changed my major after that.
The school has grown a lot since I was there. It is an old arts and crafts college/art school that has been there for over a hundred years. The architecture side of it was relatively new when I was there. They had just started the program so I was there for some of the early growing pains of the department. Going to architecture school within an art school is a very Bauhaus way of doing it. As a student, you took painting, drawing and furniture classes and were able to explore as much as you could within the architecture curriculum. Which is always hard to do because of the way that accreditation works. You don’t have as much room as you would love to have in those environments, but it was a great experience overall. Just being in San Francisco, where the city becomes the lab for the work you are doing, was great. All of the studios were taught by practicing architects from San Francisco and the Bay Area. In fact, there were very few full time tenured faculty beyond our history and theory courses.
What is your favorite building project that you’ve worked on?
There was a project that I worked on right out of school for Jim Jennings Architecture in San Francisco. We had a commission to design a guesthouse for a major art collector on his ranch in Geyserville, in Sonoma County. At the time I worked on this project in Jim’s office, Progressive Architecture magazine was still around and the PA Awards were a big deal. I remember that the awards deadline created a mad rush to get projects ready to submit and pull together a whole series of perspectives and a large model. Every office in the city was doing this; there was a two-week period where everybody was building models like crazy. This particular time was pre-computer for the most part. People were using CAD, but the presentation part was all done by hand. We were all inking drawings and perspectives. We had this project that had been briefed into us by the client, but there wasn’t a hard timeline on it. It won a PA Award and was subsequently published. Afterword, for different reasons it ended up in the proverbial flat file. The client decided not to go through with the project.
We then worked on a house for this same client and his wife, at a site located below Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill. This house took probably eight years from the beginning until it was totally done. There were a lot of battles with neighbors and approvals. This project got built and the client moved in and they lived in it for a while and for different reasons his wife hated it. She didn’t like living in the house, so they decided to sell it. At this point, I was no longer at Jim’s office as I had my own office in San Francisco and our client made a deal with his wife to the effect of, “We will sell the house on Telegraph Hill, but you have to let me build the guest house up on the ranch in Sonoma County.” Jim called me up because his office was busy, and said, “Our client wants to build the guest house up at the ranch, would you be interested in taking the project on and finishing it?”
I took that project into my own office and ran with it. The project itself turned out to be and amazing art piece. It’s a house that carves through a hill that is meant for artists to stay at on the property. The property has a number of art installations, like one by Richard Sera, for example. There are also other significant pieces on the land. He hires artists and commissions them to do installation on the property and it’s a place for those people to stay while they are working on the installation. This project will always be a favorite.
Visiting Artists House (Jim Jennings Architecture)
Who has been an important mentor among your colleagues?
Jim Jennings, especially early on, was huge for me from a design sensibility standpoint and the way he went about what he does. We still remain close.
There have been a lot of other people as well, whether it is people from my days at CCAC who I am still connected with or the director of research and planning that I am also still close with.
There are people here at Nike that have been instrumental to me and not necessarily in a design sense but in a different sensibility of how I can use my architecture and design education in a different way.
What part of the job do you like best, and as an architect what do you think you most excel at?
My job today is really different from what I would call architecture with a capital ‘A’, and the world I came from. The pace at which retail moves is so different from architecture and the job that I am in today is different in that I don’t get to sit down and design as much as I used to. It gets to be more about art directing and managing the team. There are other layers to it that make the job really interesting, like the business aspects of retail, which I didn’t think I would enjoy as much as I have. I thought if I wasn’t making and designing something all of the time that I would probably get a little stir crazy. I appreciate that I get to be heavily involved and oversee the design and the team, and also get involved in a lot of the other conversations on the strategy of what we do from the business side.
What are some Portland buildings (either new or historic) that you most admire?
I like the Mark O. Hatfield US Courthouse building downtown as a modern building. What attracted me to Portland was that there was a real texture to the city as well as a craft and quality that I enjoyed. I’ve always appreciated the overall the fabric of Portland compared to a lot of the other cities.
Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse (Bora Architects)
Portland reminds me somewhat of Oakland and Berkeley. Berkeley also has a great texture to the city with its neighborhoods, whereas Oakland seems like it fell victim to being the stepchild to San Francisco and economically didn’t have the base to maintain it.
When we moved here it seemed like even developer buildings had a level of quality and finish; some of which is dictated by weather and rain, but felt higher than the standards you would see in California.
What is your favorite building outside of Portland and besides any you’ve worked on?
There are certain favorite buildings I can recall while going to school and growing up. However, until you get the ability to travel more, so much of what you are able to experience is through photographs and books. You get drawn to certain things. The buildings that have the most impact on me now are the ones that I have been able to see in person. I have always loved [Rudolph] Schindler and the Kings Road House down in Los Angles off Melrose Ave: not just the building, but also the landscape and the nature of those spaces and how they open up. That one is a glorified tent really; it’s not much about building.
Then being able to experience spaces like the Salk Institute by Louis Kahn in San Diego. I was able to experience two Kahn buildings in the last ten years and it was impactful experiencing them versus seeing them in photographs. The Salk was one of them and the other was the Center for British Art at Yale University, which I got to see last year. The scale and craft make those buildings spiritual in nature.
The Beinecke Library by Gordon Bunshaft is a pretty wonderful building and located at Yale too, which we got to see this past year. This building has a simple diagram which makes for an interesting floor plan.
Center for British Art, Yale University (Richard Caspole)
Is there a local architect or firm you think is unheralded or deserves more credit?
I don’t know about unheralded. I like John Holmes’ work at Holst; he is kind of an old colleague. [Holmes and co-founding partner Jeff Stuhr sold the firm to four employees in 2017.] He was at Jim Jennings’ office right before I started there. John left and I actually took over one of his projects. John and I have a type of thread that ties us together, so I’ve always appreciated the work that he did at Holst.
Another person that comes to mind is Paul McKean, I appreciate the kind of houses he is doing. He did a nice house in our neighborhood. He took the worst house in the neighborhood and did a wonderful remodel for a guy who works over in the Innovation Kitchen here at Nike. He took a bad 1980’s developer-style, split-level house and designed a solution for it — much to the chagrin of the folks in the neighborhood, who are more traditional. I think that the remodel is a nice addition to the neighborhood.
I think ZGF is doing wonderful work these days on that kind of corporate level and bigger scale projects.
I’m also a fan the libraries and other projects that Thomas Hacker did.
Leedy residence (Paul McKean Architecture)
What would you like to see change about Portland’s built environment in the long term?
I don’t know if my thoughts about Portland apply as well to cities in general. It’s not as bad here as it is in San Francisco. The Bay Area is an interesting case study because although it is a radical place historically and politically — as people might think of the whole ‘summer of love’ and hippie movement — it’s really architecturally conservative as a city. I don’t see this constraint as much here in Portland. It might not be as hard here to design good buildings. Where sometimes it’s hard getting stuff built and going through design review processes.
I feel like at some point, every generation needs to add their layer to the city. I’m not nostalgic and I get heartbroken when I see somebody building an Old Victorian, new, from scratch. Those are always the things that hurt my heart. That people can’t see beyond certain styles and could maybe consider more about making something that functions well. There is certainly an additive aspect to the city and that house by Paul McKean in my neighborhood is a great example where he took a bad house and created something wonderful out of it that is modern. People had a hard time with it, maybe because of the simple lines that it had.
Who is a famous architect you’d like to see design a building in Portland?
The scale at which Thom Mayne works these days is interesting to me. It will be interesting to see how the San Francisco Federal Building and the Caltrans District 7 Headquarters in downtown Los Angeles stand up to the test of time. But the famous architect or ‘starchitect’ thing worries me; I certainly wouldn’t want a Frank Gehry building in Portland, for example. I am, however, excited that Snohetta was commissioned to come to town to design a couple of projects [the ill-fated James Beard Public Market and the to-be-completed Willamette Falls Riverwalk] .
Name something besides architecture (sneakers, furniture, umbrellas) you love the design of.
I love cars. I also love cooking food. I’ve always felt that food and cooking have a correlation to design. It’s something I like to do and I seem to find ways to relate the process of making food to architecture, design and life.
What are three of your all-time favorite movies?
I’m probably clichéd on this response but, I’ve always loved "Brazil" by Terry Gilliam. "Blade Runner" is another one that is a good future-architecture movie. I also liked "Minority Report."
What I really like, not necessarily as a film, but a sequence and set is the 2013 movie "Oblivion" by Joseph Kosinski. I loved seeing what they went through to make this movie. If you watch the featurettes on how some of the scenes were made and the amount of stuff they actually built practically, you'll see that while the house may be a cliché in its futuristic design, they built the house and then they went up and camped on a volcano in Hawaii for two weeks and just filmed 360 degree panoramas of sunrises, sunsets and clouds. They took all of that footage and built a panoramic around the set of the house and projected all of those scenes on to it. That is how they essentially lit the environment. It was naturally lit in a sense that they didn’t do any of the effects in post-production or CGI. It was all in the actual filming. They also built one of the ships to film in. I just love the fact that all of that stuff was immaculately designed and the fact that it was practically done versus being done with CGI. Hopefully the film industry gets back towards this. I think the CGI thing, as much as I love the computer myself, has become such a crutch. Working within limitations and restrictions of the practicalities of building stuff feels like you get a better product and film out of it.
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Yes! I agree people should take more risks building different styles and experimenting in Portland. There's so many disciplines why not create something totally new. This city bugs me sometimes.
Posted by: Ken | April 10, 2019 at 10:11 PM
Thanks for the comment, Ken. Forgive me if this is the wrong thing to do, but I've removed the URL you listed to make sure this is not a subtle act of spammery.
Posted by: Brian Libby | April 11, 2019 at 08:30 AM