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).

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).

...
Wikipedia