Building Wealth with Del Terrelonge

Intro:
Welcome. I’m Michele Washington, the host of Curious Story Lab, a podcast that takes a deep dive into conversations with artists, architects, creators, makers, futurists, and innovators whose work pushes beyond the boundaries. As they open up new areas of thinking within their fields. In my first episode, I’m going across the border into Toronto Canada, and I’m having a conversation with Del Terrelonge. He’s the founder and creative director of RHED. We’re talking about how he’s shifted his design ecosystem rather than clients seeking him out. His firm is tackling new ways of producing self-generated projects. Actually, I tend to think of his style of working as a mashup where he’s taken on a myriad of roles from being an artist, an architect, a designer, developer, and technologists all meshed up and mashed up together.

Host/Michele:
So, shall we start at the beginning? What started you on your path to becoming a designer?

Del Terrelonge: That’s an interesting story. So my mother, she goes, reminds me when I was a kid. What were the two things that you want it to be? And all of them, one was I wanted to be a chemist or an artist. Okay. And so as a young child, I pursued art. You know, it was something that I loved and, and, but you did it on your own, you know, I, wasn’t sort of in an art program or whatever. And when I got to high school, I remember moving to, to this area in Toronto, it’s called malt and rights. It’s very remote and go to the, we go to the school and my parents weren’t really astute to what was happening. You just go to school, go to school. And the teacher goes, okay, you, you, and you we’re putting you in this program. So the next thing you know, I’m in the four year arts, the four year I came up with the name of it was with basically what it was like shop.

Del Terrelonge: So, I’m actually taking apart cars and great night and so forth. So they really, they they’re putting you on a track to become a mechanic. Right. And I hated it. I was like, look, I couldn’t figure out like, what the hell is going on? How did I get into this? Anyway, the next year was grade 10, and one of my good friends over at his house. And his brother was older than us. His brother’s friends there is from the U S and he’s a draft Dodger, right? So, he’s hiding out in Canada. So, we start talking about school. He says to us, he goes, oh, no, no, no, you need to take the five-year arts and science, English, theater, arts, and all of this stuff. Right. That’s what you need to do. That’s going to be the area that you’re going to find more interesting.

Del Terrelonge: This, we went to school the next day, switched the program and they wouldn’t allow us to fully switch. And I remember what they did is in the, in this four year program, they had technical drawing, architectural drawing and so forth. So, half of the year was spent doing that. And the other half of year was in the arts and science program. But in all of the shop drawings, architectural drawings and so forth, I excelled. They were like, well, what’s going on? So, there was a teacher, her name was Mrs. Norris. And I never forget her name. She kind of seen what I was doing, and she pulled me out totally. And she put me into the school arts program. And so, I was really working under her tutelage from about the time I was in grade 10. And she watched me right through right through my entire high school program.

Del Terrelonge: And she really introduced me to art as I would notice as a young man going to school, fine art drawing and so forth. She’d take a group of us downtown to Toronto, to life drawing studios. And that’s really where I started to really get the feel for it. Through that. We also did a kind of a graphic design program at school, and that’s sort of how I leaned off. And I kind of veered into the whole graphic design side. And I went to obviously the college for that. And that’s how I took that direction.

Host/Michele: Interesting. So I had Mrs. Gerard, like if you were not really into art, she would actually tell you that, you know, my dear, I think you should take up another direction.

Del Terrelonge: Well, I remember it cause I, Mrs. Norris would she do like, because I was playing football in high school and watching your kid, right. You love to play football. She would not let me leave the art. She goes, no, you could miss.

Host/Michele: So, from there you like went on to college and did your design thing, but then you started a design.

Del Terrelonge: Yeah. So that was, that was interesting. So design back in my day, design college was sort of, it was a very green experience, right? You, you, you were learning basics of design. So I came out of design school, and I wanted to discover my roots per se.

Host/Michele: Del then speaks about how right after college, he decided to move to Kingston, Jamaica, where he worked at an advertising agency. And at the same time, it was a way for him to discover his Jamaican roots. All of this helped him crystallize his way of reimagining the Black Aesthetic.

Del Terrelonge: So, I actually moved to Jamaica for a year, and I worked for a design, a design agency in Jamaica, and which was, which not just working at design agency, the experience of that time in Jamaica, what it was going through politically and the upheaval and just the culture and everything that was happening. And I was living in Kingston. It was amazing. Right. So, so I had this amazing rich experience.

Host/Michele: And when you were in Jamaica, what time period was that?

Del Terrelonge: So, I was in Jamaica. It was 1976. So when I was young, right. But we used to live on a street called Bronx avenue. You probably know that people do know that famous picture or speech where Bob Marley comes out and he’s holding the hand of Edward Seaga and Michael Manley to, to create that unity or whatever. Well, I heard that because we lived behind Jamaica house. So, so, so that’s, that’s, that’s what was happening at the time. You don’t know when you’re in it. Right. But at that time there was a search for cultural identity, you know, the whole wealth factor, the middle-class the upper middle class to poor. And so if we’re looking for your place in society, all of it was kind of being mashed together. And I, and I was in that mix when it was going on.

Host/Michele: Sounds like a little bit, like you had an infusion of a Black power movement, Black arts movement,

Del Terrelonge: All of it. Yeah. Like all of it. Cause, cause coming out of, you know, as a younger

in Canada and I always say this like Canada is not much different from the U S right? So you’re searching for your identity and you’re latching on to all the things that are happening. And so, you know, the black power movement was really big at the time. And I remember in college, my last year of college, I had to write a thesis on Malcolm X, right. So we didn’t have much to do with design, but it was what moved me

Host/Michele: After one year, living in Jamaica, Del left with an amazing rich experience. He returned to Toronto in search of work in design studios, which at that time were not plentiful.

Del Terrelonge: I came back to Toronto a year later and I was trying to find work. And, you know, typically like design studios, design agencies, that sort of thing, that design students were not a big thing. They were not, it wasn’t like there was a lot of design students, more advertising agencies where, which wouldn’t employ graphic designers. So, I was dealing with all of these, these bank related design programs for, for products. And then they had this sort of a philanthropic program where they would sponsor all these different things. So I stayed there for about eight years, and I was doing work for example, on you to meet you Yohudy menu, Ann’s birthday. I designed a poster for him right through bank sponsorship and that sort of thing. So I got really exposed to the world of design through that entity. And we sponsored a program for another entity called for two, which was like a furniture support group.

And we designed all their, their branding materials and so forth. I got known for that. And I was about eight years in, and the bank was being sold to Lloyd’s bank. And I figured it was time to make a change. Prior to that, I was not thinking anything about my own business. And then I got a lot of people starting to approach me about doing work for them directly. Like DuPont was one client that we had from Formica and so forth. And I just started taking on the work and I opened my own shop and that’s how it started. And we started off and it started off small. It’s kind of, it started off with a surprising bang. We were one of three studios in the city at the time, there were two others, because again, it wasn’t a, it wasn’t a thing that was out there. Like there were design studios and I was like probably the third design studio it’s in Toronto. And we took off from there and that’s where it all started.

Host/Michele: Del then begins to shift from working in corporate then to start in his own firm, Terrelonge design, which was his first firm. And then now to his latest venture RHED, which is what he’s doing today.

Host/Michele: Yeah. You know, it’s funny because I started to think of when looking at your work, that your work shows a lot of power with design. Yeah. And I’m curious when you had Terrelonge Design, which was your first firm. Yeah. And then you started to shift into RHED that power shifted a little bit, or it was always there in Terrelonge?

Del Terrelonge: The power was always there in Terrelonge, but Terrelonge Design was, you know, it was, if you could say it from the literal standpoint, it was strictly a design firm that was solving problems for clients. Right. And on top of that, we’re trying to do some of our own work. So we could create that expression and keep maintaining it and so forth with that, you know, dissolving problems for clients. We had some clients that were very proactive in the community and so forth. And so it was a couple of musical clients and that sort of thing. So we were trying to, you know, get some of that voice into the work that we were doing, but it’s very difficult, right? You can’t, you know, you can’t bring that voice in there. I remember one instance; I was working with a client in Japan. I can’t, I can’t remember their name, but we were doing a lot of work overseas in Taiwan, in Japan, working with a client in Japan.

And we introduced this piece so that they, this, this, this client is they’re actually designers or interior designers. And we introduced this piece with their work. We have a black Jesus on the cover of their, of their, of their, of their piece. Right. And you can see the whole controversy, but they loved it because they loved the idea of how we’re trying to interconnect what you know, and what, what is kind of what you, what you expect and what you don’t expect, which is the real reality and so forth. That kind of thing. That was the basis of what we’re trying to do in exploring that theme. And, and I found as we went on with our work is that we didn’t have enough of a, of a, of a medium or a venue to be able to express that kind of, you know, voice that I had

Host/Michele: Does evoke power of design because the times you want to be able to do the uncanny and be more dynamic and provocative with your work. And so doing something that someone may look at and say that doesn’t have the same cultural context in Japan that it might have for you.

Del Terrelonge: Exactly.

Host Michele: You never know.

Del Terrelonge: ‘Because after that piece. In 1996, I got invited to do a show at a gallery in Japan called a GG & G gallery, which is in Fukuoka. And, and that show was kind of about whatever you wanted to put into it, your own expression on that sort of thing. And that’s when we were in the middle of the shift between Terrelonge and RHED at that particular time. So everything that that show was about was literally about the entire Black expression in design. So we had this, I had this talk, which was about 45 minutes, but it took about an hour and a half because every line that I spoke had to be translated by a Japanese translator. So we had all this kind of provocative work, this Black experience work that was spread throughout the gallery that people came in, they looked at it and so forth.

Then I went through this entire sort of iteration of, of speaking about design from a Black perspective and what it meant in sort of the Western world in the world in general and that sort of thing. And we were touching some pretty heavy subjects. And I remember no one was speaking in the room, they were just looking at me. And I was like, oh my God, this is, this is, this is like a brick falling into the lake, man. It’s going straight to the bottom. It’s not happening. And I was like, oh man, this is so hard. And it was, and it was so it felt so difficult because you’re saying something, then you have to break your thought while they translate. And that sort of thing. What was interesting though, when it was over, it was like the question and answer period. Everybody in that room heard everything I said at ask questions about the whole thing. So they were really on point with trying to understand what the African American or the Black designer’s plight was in their community, how they were trying to express themselves. So, it really worked. It was, it was interesting how the result came out.

Host/Michele: That’s a fascinating story, you know, to go where someone might think like, oh, there’s no context there. There’s the African community.

Del Terrelonge: Oh, I tell you that, that time in Japan, I’ve, I’ve seen the best reggae bands that I’ve seen. And I remember there’s a thing that when I was, when I was in, in, in the, in the early seventies, you would see like, like you’re like the Rastafarian movement. And they had this look and it went in and I was talking to my brother the other day about it. And I go, do you remember, because back then it was, they were called “roots men,” like a roots man movement, which is like roots reggae and all this sort of thing. Right. Everybody’s forgotten that because that name has been sort of adapted into all these kinds of north American cultural things. And I’m in Japan and we’re going to this bar, this club, and there’s these two guys outside that are letting you in. And if there was ever a uniform, it could be expressed for the roots man to Japanese dreads that were wearing this, this, this look you want to go. I was like, where my God, I never thought there was a look until I seen that.

Host/Michele: So did any of this like lead off into, like when you, when you’re doing this talk and then you’re really like looking to like shift the narrative and how you’re designing and doing some more self-generated projects. Is that what got you to do some of yourself published books? Like the Endangered Species book?

Del Terrelonge: It was interesting at the time, because there was a group of people that would kind of hang out at my studio in amongst the work that we were doing. And we’d have all these conversations about what’s coming next and all that sort of thing. And when we did the Evolution of a Dying Species, it was like this, this ability to do expression in a book. And it, and a lot of that was, was derivative as a show that was done in Japan and to create this kind of, you know, visual and verbal expression of what we were thinking. And part of the conversation at the time was, was, you know, and I guess we had seen it, I go, what’s going to happen in the media. It’s going to be, it’s going to move to this whole point, was this complete manipulation of the truth, right?

Where, where the truth doesn’t exist. Like we think it’s going to exist. So that book was sort of based on. So, we actually had real stories in there and we had stories that were not real and we kind of put it out. We said, okay, let people make up. Or, you know, let them read and let them deduce themselves. What they thought was the real things were the fake things. And it was interesting how they, how they looked at it. Cause most people, when they see print on paper and you put it out in some kind of journalistic format, they believe what what’s real my, why would you write it kind of thing. And, and there were stories in there that were completely false, but it, but it really gave us a way to, to express things that were missing. Like there’s a story that we do in there is about Nana period, the PanAsianic Yannick Negro, we call it right.

And you put this whole history down of, of what is, you know, what he was involved in and what he did and all this kind of stuff. When you put it all together, it sounds unbelievable? But when you put it in writing, people actually believe it. And, and, and that was sort of the point of the point of the piece is to kind of create fiction and real stories, blend them together and create this, this, this dialogue that makes you look at the expression, that things that we’re fighting to obtain and things that we’re creative expression in general and, and places that we’re trying to reach just as far as, as far as designers.

Host/Michele: Designer’s love creating what I call passion projects. Del’s passion project is a book “Evolution of Endangered Species.” He produced it in 1996. What struck me about this book is its scale. But also, he explores issues around Afrofuturism, racialized, spaced identity, and the Black female body. And talking to him, I realized all of this is still relevant today.

Host/Michele:

So, I want to read a passage and you challenge the front lines of racial prejudice in the Western world, pits Black and against white, Black, like me. We must not focus only on the Black and white issues and discount our races. But I’m wondering if that front lines of racial prejudice,

Del Terrelonge: It’s all real. That’s that line that you’re reading there is at the forefront of what we were thinking. Right.

Host/Michele: And I was going through the book. I like the size that it’s overscaled there, this mylar cover that’s reflective. So that if you look, when you look at it, you can see like a somewhat ghosted. Yeah. These two things start to come to mind is I start to think about Zora Neale, Hurston as an anthropologist, traveling through the deep south. And then her writing is based on truth within there’s this fictionalized parts of it that tell the story. But then when I also go back and I’m looking through your, your book, the evolution of endangered species, it also starts to evoke a lot of what’s happening today with Black Lives Matter. You’re dealing with this racialized space intention visually, and with words, and then you have this collective body of friends that gather yeah. Which is, which is very much like Afro Cobra in the Black Arts movements where you would get like this commingling of writers, artists, photographers that would just come together and they would just like talk.

Del Terrelonge: Well, that’s exactly what was going on with us back, back, back then. And, you know, it’s all driven by, you know, you, you talk about the nineties, for example, nine using Canada. There’s a lot of racism that’s going on. It affects the work that you’re doing. It affects your ability to work. It affects your ability, you know, with clients and all that sort of thing. And, and you don’t talk about it in a public way, but amongst your peers, your friends that are, that are Black, you’re African Canadians and whatever you talk about it with them, and it gives you a way to get some of that stuff out. And it also opens the door. So you can start looking at things and looking at how you want to be able to deal creatively with certain issues and certain problems and so forth. So it was, you know, as I said to, I said, there’s two things that I can remember happening in my life, which are interesting. I, but one guy who became a client did not believe that my portfolio was mine.

And they did not believe that the portfolio was mine. Right. And my, my comeback to them as a, why would you think just because I’m African Canadian or whatever, why would you think that I would be unable to address and understand your problems as a corporation and, and give you something that could do that because, because of what you see, that’s what it is. I see it differently. And we always had this part of our discussion was, and which is interesting is that every day you wake up, you think of your Blackness, like it’s, it’s part of you, you think of it, right. And I’ve asked White counterparts, do you wake up and think that you’re White, for example. And they’re like, and they look at you going, yeah, no. And I go, you have to understand the difference, right? Cause we, you think of who you are in the place you are and what you’re trying to achieve. And it’s around you all the time and how you try to deal with sort of maneuvering you’re in the world per se. Right. That that’s, that’s just part of, part of how you exist.

Host/Michele: You know, that’s interesting that you had the conversation with your White counterparts because it’s true. Like you do not have to think about all of that every day to navigate any spaces, whether it’s just walking down the block, it’s getting on the bus or a train, whether it’s going store to shop or whether it’s in work or whether it’s like doing it, doing a presentation, or like you said, I I’m going to Japan and I’m doing this lecture, this Black man that’s getting up there and doing this lecture.

Del Terrelonge: Exactly. So, so it’s a, it’s a, it’s a, and it can be difficult at times, but I tell you, it does get you on top of your work that’s for sure.

Music: break

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Now onto Curious Story Lab.

Host/Michele: With your shift from Terrelonge into RHED, how, how are things changing now? Because you tend to focus now on art, architecture, and technology. So while you still do design, it sounds like what you’re really looking at is the skills that you learned in high school, like with architectural drawings.

Del Terrelonge: Well, exactly it all came together. And I think that as a designers and artists, as an architect or whatever, I think there’s, there’s all the boundaries can disappear, and you can be many things in many different sort of arenas and so forth. A lot of what we were talking about back then and where RHED came to be is basically creating a formula where you could create the work. You could own the work and you could, self-drive sort of an economic base behind it. Right? So to, to expand what you’re doing and, and, and a lot of that comes with this whole aspect of generational wealth and creating a place in society where you actually build something. Now you’re a part of it, right? Like you own part of the block, for example, you become part of that. You become part of that, that, that, that expression.

And that was the thing that started to change. And that’s where RHED came into the picture. So it was, we took it out of my name and the reason I wanted to call it red was because it became a kind of a signature for a bigger voice, if you want to call it that. And it was R H E D. So it’s RHED, but it’s also, is it a color? Is it red? What is it in its redefining language, which is, which kind of goes back to the Seville Jamaican Patois, right? Where, where they, where they take this, this, you know, sort of English and so forth and they redefined it. And, and, and it’s interesting now is that even with my son, there’s an, who doesn’t actually know pathway, but with his friends at school, they have languages that they’re using, which is coming from Patois, which is in their regular vocabulary.

Right. Which they think it’s they’ve, they just somehow changed the, you know, the, the, the, the version of the King’s English or something like this. Right. I’m going, yes, you don’t understand where that actually the root of that and where that’s coming from. Right. So it’s intermixed into the language in such a way. And that’s kind of the thing that we were trying to portray when we were dealing with the, with the identity of RHED, it was really being able to take what was happening around us, become a part of society and start creating our own venues, right. Where we, we become, we become more than just the designer. We become the owner per se. And it, and it was interesting cause I was listening to as a 1619 podcast. Right. I don’t know if you know, the what’s her name, Nicole Hannah Jones. Does these, these podcasts, there was one that she did about these farmers, June, and August. Right?

Exactly. And there’s a huge similarity between what’s going on just because it, because it’s like, you’ve got these people that are farmers, but has a huge similarity of what’s going on. I think in like in the design industry and being black and this whole sense of trying to own kind of what you’re doing. And that’s something that I’ve been pushing for a long time, as, as, as designers, we need to be able to create own build and expand that infrastructure that we have such a, such a, you know, call today a large economic base that we can actually help each other. Right. And we can help to make things better through those venues. And that’s, that’s, that’s something that I feel strongly about.

Host/Michele: That brings me to ask you a question about finance. Like how finance was expressed in your family or was business expressed in your family.

Del Terrelonge: Yes. So we’re, we’re, we’re a West Indian household, like strict, right? So it was so you don’t discuss a lot of things like finance and all that sort of thing. That’s not something that, that is, that is taught through our, through our family. A lot of it for me was we had; I had a really good math teacher in high school that actually part of our curriculum actually made us buy stock pretend. And if you, if you made money in your stock, then you passed the course. If you, if you if you lost everything, then you would reduce your mark. You wouldn’t fail, but it would reduce. Right. But, so, so part of it is, is that you, as you’re going through the context of business and the clients you’re working with, you start to figure it out. You start to figure out, you know, how, if you’re going to do something, you’ve got to figure out the financial aspect of it. So you kind of get this crash course in how it all works because you know, we’re not coming from money. I can’t, I can’t go to my dad. And so, you know, I need $5 million to go to XYZ. So you’re basically taking, what’s your earned, what’s your, what you’ve earned and figuring out how to leverage it. And you’re figuring how to leverage it in the markets to financial markets, to be able to create the financial base for you to be able to do some of the things that you’re, you’re thinking.

Host/Michele: You know, I mean, you’re talking about designers and just in particular Black designers being selective and building businesses. I started to think like systems as designers like yourself or myself, can we put in place to build just more viable Black wealth and build more community-based businesses that whether they serve as the Black community or just service outside, which is, and being like how you get kids engaged in this, or like your son engaged in this from like an early.

Del Terrelonge: I think that one of the most important things is that the ability for a, a Black entrepreneur at a young age is to be able to understand that the ability to create business and be businesses there, right? That’s, that’s the first thing. So that mentorship that opens the door, that they can see the possibilities of participating in creating, I think is an important aspect to it. Everybody’s not going to fly at the top end of the spectrum, but there’s a huge middle zone where, where you can have a really good business, you can have a good life, you can contribute to your community and you can be fulfilled, be fulfilled in what you’re creating and what you’re doing. And it’s really to open the doors to be able to do that. Coupled with that, what you need to do is you need to also have, have the support financially, where you’ve got institutional institutions and, and various lenders and so forth that can step in, and they can look at you on an equal basis.

And, and, and, and you’re able to access financing based on your ideas and based on your ability. But then I think that’s important. And I, I just jumped back to that, to that 1619 podcasts, because that was so evident in that podcast, right. That the restrictive nature of that is what really was inhibiting, you know, these, these people from running their businesses. And that’s the fear because it’s like a corporate lynching. It’s like another way to another way to, to, to, to be subversive right. To, to the, to the black community. And that’s, that’s a, that’s a big problem. And that’s still like, that’s a big problem. Hasn’t been resolved because no one really wants to, no, one’s really faced that.

Host/Michele: I like how you drew the parallel between the Black farmers and Black designers as, or is because you, you it’s for somebody really abstract, but there is like truth because like, if you look at statistics and data, the number of Black farmers that existed 75 years ago to the Black farmers that exists now, and we’ll go through with getting these bank loans and financing and how they’re discriminated against. I mean, I vividly remember for that podcast.

Del Terrelonge:  Yeah. And, and like in my life I’ve experienced it. Right. So I know what’s there, right? So it’s, so it’s something that we’ve had to navigate our way around and through. And it’s the thing that needs to change because you can’t, you mean to inhibit somebodies’ ability to, to be able to create and give back and to create a viable, you know, life and future business and an economic base, which all feeds into that whole thing about generational wealth, you improve for yourself, you improve for your kids, you improve for your next generation. And it starts to create a, create a, a chain effect and it just starts to become better. And if you can help, you know, create the betterment of communities by, you know, having this process engaged in a proper and effective way, then, then it’s, it’s an important thing to have happen.

Host/Michele: How does it need all into your design ecosystem? Because your design ecosystem has shifted drastically over the years. When I read your firm’s mission statement, you talk about your work being inspired by Afrofuturism. And when I was look at what you’re doing now, like with branding and actually translating like your work from art into architecture, and then the bits of technology, how does that all fit?

Del Terrelonge: So, so, so in that context, like the Afrofuturism is really dealing. It’s a, for me, for my, in my interpretation of it’s taking my identity, my culture, who I am, who I’ve been developed too as an individual. And I carry that through, into the future, what do I want to see happen 20 years, 30 years from now, how our community is going to be, what kind of architecture is going to be able to, can we create to be able to re, to, to basically create a better living experience, right? So all of these different aspect’s kind of flow into this, into this sense of thinking. And that’s when you look at, you know, foods, you know, we did one project, which we called the Cogeneration boat. We designed a boat, which the whole idea of that boat, the boat is like a battery. So, so which runs on natural gas, right?

Del Terrelonge: So, you have your entertainment on the lake with your boat. When you get back to your boat house, you plugged the boat in and it helps power the boat house, right? So it’s like this, like a, almost like a, a charging station while you’re out running the boat. When you come in now you’ve got this stored energy that you can access when you can use. So it’s really thinking about how can you make things like that work from the standpoint of practicality, but you’re using clean energy and so forth, and you’re creating this way of, of existing. And we take that sort of thinking through all of these elements that we’re doing. We have a project we’re doing in a rural area of, of, of, of Southside of Toronto. And it’s all about that. It’s interpreting how people can live right, and so forth. And it’s this whole thing about, about, you know, reaching to these other places. It doesn’t have to necessarily be, you have to live in an, in a metropolis in a city and that sort of thing, you have to look at other venues. And as we go down the road in the future, and as cities become more expensive for families and for, for groups of people, what are going to be the alternatives that are going to be good alternatives, right? So, so a lot of that thinking is what we’re trying to play into our work.

Host/Michele: Are you working where you approach developers, and you bring the projects to them.

Del Terrelonge: We are, we work where we are the developers. So, so what we do is, so I’ll have, in certain projects, I’ll have a group of partners, but we become the developer. Right? So, so, and then I’ll work through that group as the design partner within that context. But you’re developing, you’re designing, you’re doing the architectural contexts, all of it, right. For the actual project. So you’re not because otherwise it’s back to that same thing where I’m going to approach a developer, the developer’s going to become, you know, you’re going to become the client of the developer and all the, all the residual value from this is going to end up and feed to somebody else. What you want to do is you want to be able to create the base, the residual value and expand that base. Now I’m a first in a lot of cases, I’m a first generation, this was a lot tougher, but second generation, for example, for my son and sofa, it will become easier, right? Third-generation will become easier as you go along, but somebody, you, you just have to step out though. You’ve got to step out there and you’ve got to take that risk. And you’ve got to, you’ve got to, you know, knock on those doors and you’ve got to for me, anyway, in my opinion, you’ve got you, you’ve got to take the take the road.

Host/Michele: For RHED, community is critical to their process. They fully understand the importance of being respectful with the communities that they’re creating projects for. It’s how they’re able to make and maintain strong connections. And it also helps when they need to sell projects to these same communities, which they often are not a part of.

Del Terrelonge: We had a community meeting where people from around the area came to see it, and they’re very receptive or they, I mean, they, they, they kind of love the concept of love, what we’re about. We’ve never had a problem selling our ideas to the community. The problem comes into is, is once you’re outside of that realm. I mean, I remember we were doing a hotel project once and I walked into a bank, my partner and I, and over the phone, the bank, ready to give us the loan. We walked into the office and the guy looked as like, oh, excuse me. Who are you? That’s like what you are. You’re those guys. Yeah. That’s awesome. So you have a lot of those things that you’ve got to go through, but I think one of the important things is you really learn how to connect to the communities that you’re trying to design for and where you’re putting things in.

Host/Michele: How do you pivot between art, architecture, and technology, and then working with an architect. So you bring people in based on the project needs where you have maybe a collective team of people.

Del Terrelonge: Exactly. Yeah. So, so we have architects and drafts people that will work for the company, but they’re brought in on an as-needed basis depending on the project. But we have a core group that can kind of handle everything. And, you know, we deal with, you know, consultants, engineers, and all the different aspects of, of, of the context of how to get a project, you know, through the permits and built and that sort of thing.

Del Terrelonge: Well, RHED understands, they’re not architects. They look at themselves more as architectural designers, they bring in technical people to finish drawings and to stamp these drawings, yet these same materials maintain the RHED firm’s stamp in order to move forward.

Del Terrelonge: And it has to be because you have to, for us, you have to be able to have that connection to it. You can’t just design something and then kind of pass it off. And then hopefully it’s going to get to the next, you know, to the next step. Sure. So we’ll bring in technical people to actually, you know, finished drawings, stamp drawings, and so forth and that sort of thing, but they’re all coming with our name on it, right. So it’s all coming from RHED. We can speak about a specific thing could be related to graphic design, or it could be interior design or product designer. And that sort of thing you can, that you can talk about design today and you could be a, you know, a design of a chemical formula for example. Right. So, so it’s, it’s, it embodies such a bigger scope per se.

And my theory is like design is involved in everything like it’s everywhere. And it’s just, just, you know, how is it like the freezers that are designed to hold a vaccine, for example, that are gonna, you know, take out the COVID vaccines. I mean, that’s all, all the design thinking goes into how are we going to make that efficient? How are we going to make that work? How’s it going to be transportable, et cetera, et cetera. Right. So, so, so all aspects of everything that we do have some effect or are touched by some part designed.

Host/Michele: What’s inspiring you right now for you to move on to your next frontier, because I always feel not just one sector, a medium can hold like a designer, an artist, or visionary like yourself.

Del Terrelonge: Expression is a, is a hard thing to turn off. And as long as you want to have the ability to express, and you’re going to go in as many different venues as possible from the architectural side, the around of a project as longer. So from the sense of design, you know, identity and, and, and a lot of the work that we’re starting to do is just about expression.

Host/Michele: And pushing forward. Del’s examines ways of creating pieces of posters. He looks at images that express ideas then examines how to couple these images with the context of the narrative, as it speaks to the whole idea of a poster as a piece of art.

Del Terrelonge: So, it’s creating a piece of poster, an image that’s expressing an idea and we’re looking at, and we’ve been doing that. And we be a lot more of that in coupled with, in the context of the work, because that’s, for me, there’s a lot of fulfillment in that, and there’s a lot of fulfillment and being able to put something together, really talks about an idea as a piece of art and communicate something that, that, that people may not have been looking at and so forth. And it’s, you know, it’s, it’s one of the interesting things. I think one of the pieces I sent you was a book that we did call “FLAVA,” right? Which is we did that in like 2009 or something like this for, for a dentist. That is that that started a gallery. And I designed his house, the original house to be part house art, residential park gallery was called Wedge gallery.

And it developed over the years, we also designed the branding identity and all of the, the logo and everything that was sort of about the, the entire sort of concept of where he was going with this, you know, 10 years later, he came to me and says, you know, we want you to design the book, right? Because obviously you were instrumental in starting a lot of this. So we want you to design the books. No problem. So he, you know, he puts together his collection of art or photography. His base is mostly photography, and we start putting it together. But now he’s working with, with an art community in Toronto, that is, it’s a diverse group. It’s a mixed group. It’s like White, Black. And it’s a mixed group of, you know, of, of art realist per se. And we’re designing this book. The traditional approach was no, no, you just need to put the photographs on white pages.

That’s, that’s what you do. You don’t, what’s all this stuff that you’re doing. And, and the, and it was interesting cause we had this discussion and I know some of them didn’t like it. We had this discussion and I go, part of the, part of the reason is we want to create a framework that doesn’t overpower the art, but it’s not like what everybody else is doing, what it used to be, because we need to create a framework or backdrop that is Afro Centric, that is ours where we can show our work or we can be part of it through that, that context and the why bring it up. That idea also flows into what we’re talking about in Architecture. So when you look at the context of Afrofuturism and I always say this, what I want to live in a house that is designed to look like a plantation, no, I have no desire for that.

Del Terrelonge: Right. None whatsoever. Right? So we want to look at Architecture in a way, which gives the Black experience, a new layer, a new format, a new backdrop to, to grow from. And I remember we were doing this years ago, we were one of six or seven firms that were invited to do a competition, to design a jazz club for Kareem Abdul Jabbar. And so we put together a design, he came to Toronto, he’s meeting all these different, different people and so forth. Right? And I mean, I’ve never met Kareem Abdul Jabbar. And he came to our office and we, we, we gave him the presentation. And what we did is we had no context to a speakeasy, to a jazz club, which is out in the 1920s and so forth. It was all about what, to me, what jazz is, is this evolving thing. It’s an evolving music, right?

So let’s create an environment where it can evolve and where everybody else saw it. As we need to go back to a traditional basis where we’re going to create like the cotton club, we’re going to create something like visually like that, that we’re, that, that the jazz is going to go into. And that’s really, for me, it’s a core of all of this, right? We are not, we, we were, we came from there, we had to be put into certain places and we have to do things. But now we are, I think our people are the future, right? That’s, that’s, that’s who, that’s the black experience. That’s what it’s about. Right. We’ve come through hell to where we are now. And obviously we’ve survived all against all odds. And I think that we like the black community culturally has really the, you know, the, the embodiment of the vision of the future and that’s who we are and that’s where we need to go. And that’s what we need to express.

Host/Michele:                                                                                                1

Del Terrelonge: The next, the next phase of my life? What does it look like? I think, I think the next phase of my life is really trying to strip out all the excess and really become down to the core of what I’ve been trying, trying to do. Right. That’s number one. I think it’s the architectural basis, a really strong component of it, but it’s really trying to simplify a lot of things of what we’ve been doing and create in a way smaller projects, but smaller projects that have more intention and, and more meaningful. My future is I don’t really want a piece. Anybody. I just wanna express my vision now. Like it’s like, let’s strip all that away. Here’s what I’m saying. Here’s what I’m going to talk about and so forth. If it hurts you while it hurts you, I’m sorry. You know, I, I was even using, you know, I’ve used that term a couple of times to corporate lynching.

I don’t know people have been going, oh my God, where you saying? You know, and I, and, and I said that, I remember saying this, I was in a meeting once a years ago with them, for the lender and were talking about how they’re going to structure the steel. And I said, look, what you’re doing is that that is a corporate lynching. The guy, you almost fell out of his chair when I said it to him, right. Because of the impact of the words. And I think a lot of that, I’m not, I don’t want to apologize for, for some of the things that need to be said. And my future is, is, you know, not going out there being that, you know, say for example, being aggressive, but expressively really telling more of the truth of what I see and, and, and getting in tune with that and stripping away the excess and really unveiling that, that layer of, of what exists and, and becoming true, true to yourself in your work. That’s, that’s sort of what I see.

Host/Michele: Thank you so much. I can’t wait until I can start really traveling again.

Del Terrelonge: I know, I know I missed, because I remember we used to meet in New York when I was in New York. It’s like, we haven’t, haven’t seen you in years. It’s crazy. Right.

Host/Michele: It’s been really good because I, I have these conversations with friends that are architects and work in other areas. And I always say to them, I said, you know, we need to think about more ways of working more collaboratively, more in an interdisciplinary way.

Del Terrelonge: Yeah. But, but what you’re saying is so important, right? That’s that is the core of the whole thing is that, you know, you’re able to actually create something like that. And if it, you know, with access to the proper financing, then that starts to become, you know, become a viable, like a viable thing and it starts to change. So I think, I mean, having those conversations, being able to talk to people and being able to exchange those ideas or is in the futures could be hugely important. Hugely important. I got to say, this is, this is like, has been, it’s been great to be able to do it like number one and, and I, and I wish you all the success and all, because I know you’re going to do many of these, and I think it’s amazing.

HOST/Michele: And I thank you for taking the time to do this.

Del Terrelonge: No problem, as they say, walk it and I’ll speak to you soon and go from there. Okay. Thanks.

Outro:
That’s it for our first episode, for more information on red design studio, check out their website, www.rhed-22.com.

You can also follow them on Instagram at RHED built projects, @ R H E D built projects.
I’m Michele Washington, the creator and host I want to give big shout outs to Alicia Ajayi who’s our producer she  worked feverishly with all these episodes that you’ll be hearing.
Our sound engineer is Joanne Samuels. She also created the music for this episode
Cheers to our intern is Sherard Quow.
You can also find us on social media we’re on Twitter and Instagram @curious story lab and. And you can check out our website, Curious Story Lab.com. If you want to listen to our episodes there too. And don’t forget to follow us on either Apple or Spotify. Wven better, we’d love it if you would leave us a review or tell us what you’d like or would like to hear in the near future. So, it’s a wrap Peace Out.