Jim Childress received his Bachelor of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1977 and 1978 respectively. He joined Centerbrook Architects and Planners in 1979, becoming a principal in 1992 and a partner in 1996. In 2001 he was invested into the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects.
Mr. Childress' work includes numerous projects at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York under the directorship of Nobel Laureate Dr. James D. Watson. His experience at Cold Spring Harbor includes both adapting the Laboratory’s historic buildings to meet the needs of a twenty-first century biomedical institution while also carefully inserting new buildings on campus.
He has been the architect for the expansion of the Trudeau Institute, a national center for immunology research in Saranac Lake, New York; the Medical Library for the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Aurora; the National Outdoor Leadership School Headquarters in Lander, Wyoming; the School of Law at the University of Colorado in Boulder; and the Fairfield Museum and History Center in Connecticut. He has also designed more than 25 single-family houses. In 1994 he was selected by Interior Magazine as one of the decade's "40 National Architects under 40."