Charles Utter Deaton was born in Clayton, New Mexico, on January 1st, 1921. Shortly after his birth, his parents moved the family to a plot of land in Oklahoma. Charles' mother was an artist, while his father was an oil geologist, which probably was the reason for the move to the oil-rich soils of Oklahoma. For the first two years of living on the land, the Deaton family lived in a tent until they had the means to erect a one-room home. Charles was the youngest child, and he took traits from both his mother and father - his science and math genes were from his father, while his artistic abilities were from his mother.

As Charles graduated from high school in Oklahoma, the Great Depression had started across the United States, and the family did not have the means to send Charles off to college. Luckily, his artistic side had manifested in a growing small business for Charles during his high school career, providing commercial artwork for customers. He was also fascinated by board games and created a few, one inspired by his father's business in oil called "Gusher," which was marketed nationally and patented. At the beginning of World War II, Charles was able to visit the New York World's Fair and was inspired by the design of the fair to become an architect. However, as the war raged, Charles put his design sensibilities to use at a Lockheed Aircraft plant in California.

After the war, Charles moved to New York City, where he got his feet wet in the architectural world. He moved to St. Louis shortly thereafter to work as an architect at the Bank Building and Equipment Company. Charles learned not only architectural skills on the job but also the intricacies of designing banks, which he used later in life to create and patent bank details such as a new system of vault doors with hidden hinges.

Why, might you be asking, are you using Charles Deaton as the Colorado architect example? In 1955, Charles Deaton moved to Colorado and stayed there for the rest of his life. Colorado claims him as a Colorado architect, so we're doing the same!

After moving to Colorado, Deaton's first big (and perhaps most well-known) project was designing a home for himself. With land on the top of Genesee Mountain, Charles took his design sensibilities of organic forms and created the Sculptured House in 1963. The home was also known as the Sleeper House, as it was featured prominently in the 1973 Woody Allen movie Sleeper. The home interior was never finished during Deaton's lifetime, but perhaps it was because he was on to bigger and better projects.

A year later, in 1964, one of Deaton's bank buildings was erected in Casper, Wyoming. The building was a sculptural ovoid shape with concrete panels, which some likened to looking like a peeling onion. A more staid and modern rectangular building surrounded the sculptural ovoid shape. While not a bank, the building is in use today and is still known and beloved by the residents of Casper.

The next bank Deaton designed took the sculptural shape to new heights. The Key Bank in Englewood, Colorado, was right in Charles' backyard. The design for this bank building was purely sculptural—no rectilinear parts in sight. In fact, Charles sculpted the building out of clay and then divided the pieces up and laid them out on graph paper to figure out the engineering and construction drawings for the building. Again, made with the same troweled-on white concrete as the Casper bank, the shape reminds me somewhat of a round seashell.

In 1972 and 1973, the Truman Sports complex, initially designed by Deaton, opened. The two complexes for the Chiefs football team (Arrowhead Stadium) and the Royals baseball team (Kaufman Stadium) were meant to have a floating roof on a track that could slide from one building to another to provide closure in the winter months. This sliding roof was never realized, but the two stadiums still stand proud. (This is unusual in this day and age of tearing down stadiums and erecting new ones that look like old, classical buildings - which would have happened had a property tax increase passed in 2024). The stadium's design is often attributed to Kivett and Myers, and in fact, was the subject of a lawsuit from Deaton against the Kivett & Myers firm, which was settled out of court.