Selection of Fay Jones of Arkansas for the American Institute of Architect's Gold Medal follows by one year the selection of Joseph Esherick of San Francisco for the same honor. Although the Southerner's buildings are dissimilar in appearance from those of the Northern Californian's, both architects share qualities whose recognition bodes a heartening departure from some of the recent glittering excesses of Postmodern architecture.
Esherick and Jones could be called universal regionalists. Thoroughly grounded in Modernism, they have consistently imbued their buildings with characteristics of their respective regions. Both are designers primarily of smaller-scaled works, notably exquisite houses finished in indigenous materials and full of natural light. And both are inspired teacher - Esherick at the University of California at Berkeley and Jones at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.
Jones, sixty-eight, is the American Institute of Architects' forty-eighth Gold Medal recipient. AIA's highest honor, and arguably the most prestigious international architectural prize, the Gold Medal is analogous to the lifetime achievement Academy Award in that it is conferred by the elite governing body - AIA's Board of Directors - of the leading professional organization in its field. Since the God Medal was an established in 1907, recipients have included Britain's Edwin Lutyens, Alvar Aalto of Finland, Kenzo Tange of Japan, Canadian Arthur Erickson, and such American greats as Charles McKim, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Among those who consider Wright America's preeminent architectural genius, recognition of Fay Jones signals a long-awaited return of attention to Wright's principles of organic architecture.
In 1938, a Technicolor short subject about Wright's new Johnson Wax Company building Racine, Wisconsin, convinced Jones he wanted to become an architect. He was then a high school senior in El Dorado, Arkansas. "I'd never seen anything like that before," he recalls. "All those curves, like in Buck Rogers of Flash Gordon. It was the first time I remember hearing the name Frank Lloyd Wright."
Because Arkansas offered no architectural education at the time, Jones studied civil engineering at the University of Arkansas for three years, in the meantime reading everything he could about Wright and his work. After World War II, which included a fifteen-month combat tour as a Navy flier in the South pacific, Jones started over by enrolling in a fledgling architecture program at the University Arkansas. He graduated as one of five in its first class.
Four years later, after graduate studies at Rice University in Houston and a year of teaching architecture at Oklahoma University, Jones served a four-moth apprenticeship to Wright at Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin, and then returned to Fayetteville to teach at his alma mater and practice architecture. He succeeded the founding chairman of the architecture department in 1966 and became the first dean of the university's school of architecture in 1974. He gave up administrative duties after two years but continued teaching for another decade.
Jones started out designing houses, and a high percentage of his work remains residential. During the sixties and seventies, his work got a fair amount of attention in national magazines. Features in Life, House Beautiful,
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