Tim Sappington

Tim grew up in the Washington DC area and his interests include painting, film and animation, as well as stagecraft. He attended the Washington University School of Architecture in St. Louis. There he produced a number of 16 mm shorts and animations including “A Day in the Clouds”( 1968), shot in the White Mountains of NH. Sections of it were aired on a CBS affiliate in St. Louis as part of a segment on student filmmaking.

As a graduate student he was invited to work on a film crew at KETC, the St. Louis PBS affiliate, assisting them in a half dozen classroom shorts and one feature film on various subjects dealing with kids. He also worked as assistant camera, gaffer, best boy, production manager and art director on a film involving a fantasy studio set. Two of his animated films The Tiger, 1976 and How to Cut Up with Cut Outs, 1980 were shown on WETA in Washington, DC.

While studying architecture he sought to enrich the minimalism of the post-international era by applying ornament and a high level of aesthetics to his studio projects - which was out of favor with most of his instructors. This led to the completion of his most recent short film, The Architect’s Dream in 2000 which is a lyrical but humorous call for more humanity in architecture. The film has been used at the University of NH and is part of the Toledo ( Ohio) Art Museum’s library collection.

Sappington served as an apprentice at a DC architecture firm and then moved to New Hampshire in 1981 to work full time on The Architect’s Dream. As the only resident architect in northern NH, he has been attracting commissions ever since.

Projects in New Hampshire have included town rehabs, a school, a day care center, medical facilities and state human services facilities.

However, his most creative projects have been the design of private residences, including a recent request to design a house on the northeast coast of Brazil that is inspired by the shape of a conch shell.

Sappington is currently focused on combining art with architecture by incorporating elaborately carved woodwork. He has also designed sets for Theater North, which is based in Berlin. For the past 25 years, Sappington has worked extensively with local high school students on set construction, community projects and on his own architecture projects. Many of these students have gone on to pursue careers in the arts and architecture.

Tim was involved in the establishment of Berlin’s St. Kieran Center for the Arts, a community arts center and performance space. His dream is a new regional theater and cultural center that serves both arts education and as a performance venue.

He envisions the North Country as the perfect setting for his most ambitious idea, inspired by The Domain of Arnheim, Edgar Alan Poe’s story of a magical garden. The project would take the shape of a terrain sculpted into miniature tower-like mountains and covered with a geodesic dome or membrane structure. The garden would be filled with exotic orchids, ivies, rock plants, tiny lakes and waterfalls and would be an ecologically and aesthetically positive asset designed to stimulate the local economy.

Last updated: September 15, 2008