Grant Jones

Grant Richard Jones (b. August 29, 1938) is an American landscape architect, poet, and founding principal of the Seattle firm Jones & Jones Architects, Landscape Architects and Planners. In more than four decades of practice, his work in ecological design has garnered widespread recognition for its broad-based and singular approach, one that is centered on giving voice to the land and its communities (Enlow, 6–7). Called the “poet laureate of landscape architecture” (Miller, 7) Jones’s poetry informs his designs (Jones, 10).

His firm—co-founded with Ilze Grinbergs Jones in 1969—has been at the forefront of the fields of landscape aesthetics, environmental planning, design for cultural spaces, and scenic and wildlife conservation (Woodbridge, 29, 60). Jones & Jones is perhaps best known for pioneering the habitat immersion method of zoo design at Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo, but their work has also transformed design and scenic planning practices for highways, rivers, parks, forests, watersheds, and communities (Streatfield, 20).

Jones & Jones is the recipient of more than 100 awards, including the first-ever Firm of the Year Award from the American Society of Landscape Architects (2003), the Richard J. Neutra Award for Professional Excellence (2007), and the President’s Award of Excellence from the American Society of Landscape Architects (1980).

Early life and influences

Grant Jones grew up in Richmond Beach, Washington, a small community on Puget Sound located 10 miles north of Seattle. His father was Victor N. Jones, an architect. His mother, Ione Thomas Jones, encouraged his exploration of nature, particularly the tide flats below the family farm. This early, intimate connection with his home landscape would shape Jones’s language and his understanding of place (Amidon, 14).

Jones received a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Washington in 1961, and remained at UW as a Graduate Poet under Theodore Roethke until Roethke’s death in 1963. His study with Roethke further strengthened his awareness of the connection between language and the natural world.

With the encouragement of his professor and mentor, landscape architect Richard Haag, Jones entered the graduate program for landscape architecture at Harvard University, where he received a master’s degree in 1966. While at Harvard, Jones theorized that the distinct geologic and living forms that together define a landscape are just as much a language as the linguistic units that together comprise a poem. He created a Fortran model to catalog and measure the various intrinsic elements of a landscape and evaluate their influence on its overall aesthetic value. This early Fortran program would later inform his firm’s ground-breaking work in visual resource assessment, including plans for the Nooksack River and Puget Sound (Miller, 7).

In 1966, Jones won Harvard’s Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellowship and spent the next two years exploring South America and Europe, searching for examples of regionally distinctive community planning, architecture, and culture. As Sheldon Fellow, Jones sought to revitalize the concept of environmental determinism, the idea that plants, animals, and people—as well as human culture and language—all evolve from their landscape, or physical environment. He also sought to demonstrate that the study of diverse cultural and architectural adaptations to place could serve as a model to improve development practices in American communities (Amidon, 19).

Jones & Jones

Grant Jones returned to Seattle in 1969 and established Jones & Jones with his then-wife, Ilze Grinbergs Jones. Ilze and Grant had studied together at the University of Washington, and both shared the conviction that architecture and landscape architecture are inseparable disciplines (Enlow, 6–7). They had traveled together during the Sheldon Fellowship and were both strongly influenced by the principles of bioregionalism (Amidon, 21). Ilze Jones influenced the new practice through her love of the urban built environment and her interest in public green infrastructure, community building, and broad-scale environmental planning.

In 1973, the two were joined by Johnpaul Jones, an architect of Cherokee-Choctaw descent whose work designing cultural spaces has received wide acclaim. Deeply rooted in his Native American heritage and closely connected to the land, Johnpaul’s designs include museums and other cultural spaces that honor and share the living heritages of indigenous people. Notable among them is the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian on the Mall in Washington, D.C., for which he served as lead design consultant.

Jones & Jones has grown in subsequent years to include partner Mario Campos and a staff of more than a dozen architects and landscape architects, all committed to the firm’s mission of connecting people with place (Enlow, 7).

As landscape historian David C. Streatfield writes, “Their designs interpret place as bio-physical processes, and as intertwined acts of cultural will and transformation. […] Ever since its inception this firm has established new standards of excellence in analysis and creative design.” (Streatfield, 20) And in conferring its highest honor, the Firm of the Year Award, the ASLA recognized Jones & Jones for “the unique culture it has created and its philosophy of embracing that which is challenging and unexplored. Its work and its commitment to future generations have created an enduring legacy…”

Selected projects

In the early 1970s, Jones & Jones was commissioned by the Whatcom County Park Board to develop a preservation plan for the Nooksack River in northwest Washington State. The plan identified intrinsic landscape features of high aesthetic value and made recommendations for their preservation, while suggesting other areas that would be suitable for recreational uses. The study involved mapping the river’s watershed and viewshed and then breaking it up into its component drainage basins, branches, channels, and floodplains. Each distinct river segment was then analyzed using a series of quantitative and qualitative measurements based on integrity, health, uniqueness, and resiliency. This was the first plan ever developed for a river, and the project received an Honor Award from the American Society of Landscape Architects (Amidon, 43).

The analytic methods employed by Jones & Jones in the study of the Nooksack River proved valuable to other projects requiring the careful management of visual resources. These included corridor planning for utilities and the design of roads.

In 1990, Jones was asked to join the design team for the expansion of the Paris to Lexington Road (aka Paris Pike), an historic 12-mile road leading from Lexington to Paris, Kentucky. The old two-lane highway could no longer handle the demands of increased traffic, but expanding the road to four lanes threatened the mature trees, historic stone fences, and original farm entrances along the route. It was the first time since World War II that a landscape architect had been approached to design a highway (Amidon, 34). Jones’ solution was to break the highway into two separate ribbons that weave through the landscape independently, while ensuring that the most characteristic features of the landscape remain intact.

The firm has become well known for the design of scenic roadways and wildlife highways, considering them a vital form of green infrastructure.

U.S. Highway 93 crosses the Flathead Indian Reservation in western Montana, nation of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (CSKT). The 55-mile stretch of road runs north from Evaro to Polson, Montana, traversing a majestic landscape of expansive valleys and mountain ranges that is home to a great diversity of wildlife, including grizzly bears, deer, elk, bighorn sheep, and painted turtles. For much of its history, the highway sliced straight through the landscape, through small communities and towns, and through wildlife habitat, resulting in the decline of some species and in numerous roadway fatalities (Jones & Jones, 1–4).

Working closely with the CSKT, along with the Federal Highway Administration and the Montana Department of Transportation, Jones & Jones redesigned the highway to respond to and respect the unique aesthetic and ecological characteristics of the landscape, seeking ways for the land to influence the road. As the firm notes, “The design of the reconstructed highway is premised on the idea that the road is a visitor” (Jones & Jones, 1).

The design concepts for the highway, begun in 2000, sought to simultaneously encourage understanding of the land and of the communities that call it home, including the Salish and Kootenai people and rich populations of plants and animals (Jones & Jones, 1). In addition to following the topography and respecting cultural concerns, a key objective of the design process was the development of numerous wildlife crossing areas designed to ensure the safe passage of animals over or under the roadway. Road-kill data was analyzed, along with historic migration patterns, to determine where to site crossings in an effort to restore traditional wildlife movement routes.

U.S. Highway 93 now features forty wildlife crossing structures. The project received the Transportation Planning Excellence Award from the Federal Highway Administration in 2008.

Jones & Jones pioneered the habitat immersion approach to zoo design with the development of the gorilla and African savannah exhibits at Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo (Hyson, 23; Hancocks, 118). In 1978, zoo director David Hancocks approached the firm for a master plan. Rather than the traditional arrangement of animal enclosures behind concrete walls and bars, Hancocks and his design team, led by Grant Jones, sought to recreate the animals’ natural habitat. The gorilla forest was developed in the first phase of the project: careful manipulation of landform, plants, and sight lines immersed not only the gorillas but also the visitors in the animals’ native habitat.

The landscape immersion method has been described as “an astonishing departure from conventional zoo design because it reflected a pronounced shift in philosophy” from a homocentric to a biocentric view of the world (Hancocks, 118). The philosophy is now widespread (Hyson, 23), and since the late 1970s, Jones & Jones has developed master plans and specialized habitat designs for scores of zoos on four continents.

ILARIS (Intrinsic Landscape Aesthetic Resource Information System) is a GIS model developed by Jones & Jones to assess the intrinsic aesthetic value of Puget Sound. In 2002, the firm was commissioned by the Trust for Public Land to develop a system to evaluate and protect important landscape features of Puget Sound and its near-shore areas.

ILARIS was based on Grant Jones’ early Fortran program from his days at Harvard, as well as on Jones & Jones’ breakthrough scenic planning work for rivers such as the Nooksack and Alaska’s Susitna. The model is a framework to synthesize and assess the biologic, cultural, and aesthetic values of intrinsic landscape features, and the result is a language that gives voice to the landscape and assists conservation and planning organizations in making land-use decisions. In 2005 ILARIS received a Research and Communication Merit Award from the Washington Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects (WASLA), and in 2006 the model won the National ASLA Professional Award of Honor in the Research Category.

Selected awards

Selected publications

References

  1. ↑ https://lafoundation.org/leadership/laf-honors/grant-jones/
  2. ↑ http://www.washington.edu/news/blog/two-famous-names-added-to-college-of-built-environments-roll-of-honor/

External links

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