4Source Books in

Landscape Architecture

Jane Amidon, Series Editor

Grant Jones / Jones & JonesILARIS:The Puget Sound Plan

Published by

Princeton Architectural Press

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New York, New York 10003

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© 2007 Princeton Architectural Press

All rights reserved

Printed and bound in China

10 09 08 07 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any

manner without written permission from the publisher,

except in the context of reviews.

Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify

owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected

in subsequent editions.

Editing: Nicola Bednarek

Typesetting/Layout: Paul Wagner

Special thanks to: Nettie Aljian, Sara Bader, Dorothy

Ball, Janet Behning, Becca Casbon, Penny (Yuen Pik)

Chu, Russell Fernandez, Pete Fitzpatrick, Clare Jacobson,

John King, Nancy Eklund Later, Linda Lee, Katharine

Myers, Lauren Nelson Packard, Scott Tennent, Jennifer

Thompson, and Joseph Weston of Princeton Architectural

Press —Kevin C. Lippert, publisher

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Grant Jones/Jones & Jones : ILARIS : the Puget Sound

plan. — 1st ed.

p. cm. — (Source books in landscape architecture ; 4)

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN-13: 978-1-56898-604-3 (alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 1-56898-604-1 (alk. paper)

1. Landscape—Computer simulation. 2. ILARIS.

3. Landscape protection—Washington (State)—Puget

Sound Region. 4. Jones, Grant R.—Interviews. 5.

Landscape architects—United States—Interviews. 6. Jones

& Jones.

QH75.G685 2007

712.09164’32—dc22

2006037146

Source BookS in Architecture:

Morphosis/Diamond Ranch High School

The Light Construction Reader

Bernard Tschumi/Zénith de Rouen

UN Studio/Erasmus Bridge

Steven Holl/Simmons Hall

Mack Scogin Merrill Elam/Knowlton Hall

Zaha Hadid/BMW Central Building

Source BookS in LAndScApe Architecture:

Michael Van Valkenburgh/Allegheny Riverfront Park

Ken Smith Landscape Architect/Urban Projects

Peter Walker and Partners/Nasher Sculpture Center Garden

Grant Jones/Jones & Jones/ILARIS: The Puget Sound Plan

Acknowledgments 4

Foreword, Bill Miller 7

Data and Chronology 10

Conversations with Grant Jones 13

3 Influences 13

3 A Context and a Catalyst 55

3 Building a Model 59

3 Puget Sound 69

3 Relevance and Critique 85

Gallery 95

Asking the Animals for Advice, Frederick Steiner 121

Credits 126

Bibliography 126

Biographies 128

Contents

13

Influences

Jane Amidon (JA): Grant, in 1978 your essay

“Landscape Assessment . . . Where Logic and

Feelings Meet” was published in Landscape

Architecture magazine. In it you outline Jones &

Jones’s early approach to visual resource

management and describe the importance of three

visual qualities in the landscape: vividness,

intactness, and unity. You provide a hand-drawn

flow chart of visual resource management for

highways that is clearly a precursor to ILARIS. Also

included are examples of your poetry that offer a

very different manner of describing intrinsic

landscape qualities. You conclude that the essay

leads in two seemingly disparate directions:

toward a poetic and highly individualized view

on one hand, yet toward a technical, objective

view on the other. This brings to mind the

Dickens episode where the strict teacher orders

a schoolboy to describe a horse. His reply

paints a picture of a free-running creature,

flowing mane, glistening flanks over contoured

muscles. But he is chided, and the teacher turns

to the next student for the correct reply: “A

horse is a large, solid-hoofed quadruped,

family Equidae…” Both viewpoints are valid.

What are the sources of this fusion of logic and

emotion that distinguish Jones & Jones’s approach

to landscape assessment? As you point out in

Landscape Journal (2001), blurring the bounds

between perception of place (the subjective) and

analytical site assessment (the objective) to create

“a scholarship of a different kind” is a technique

not shared by many design and planning

practices.

Grant Jones (GJ): I grew up in Seattle in a household

overflowing with the cultivation of plants and ideas.

My family lived on a small farm above the tidal flats

Conversations with Grant Jones Compiled and edited by Jane Amidon

14 Conversat ions

in Richmond Beach, about ten miles north of

downtown. From our house you could see the flats

and, at low tide, the sand bars. There was a swamp

nearby, trapped by the railroad tracks, and I loved

going out exploring with my rowboat, bottom fishing,

observing the rhythm of the tides. Growing up, I was

surrounded by these three worlds: an upland farm, a

swamp, and the saltwater flats. Living in such close

contact with nature, I learned to appreciate the visual

gestalt of the fundamental elements and patterns of a

place. This early interest would later lead me to study

regional aesthetics while in architecture school.

Since my grandfather was a builder and my father

an architect, architecture loomed over my childhood,

and while that influenced my career choice, in many

ways I also revolted against it to become what I am. I

entered the College of Architecture and Urban

Planning at the University of Washington in 1958

and graduated with a Bachelor of Architecture in

1961. In school I met people who have been friends

and colleagues ever since, including Laurie Olin; Bob

Hanna; and Ilze Grinbergs, who I was married to for

fifteen years. She is the other founding partner of

Jones & Jones and has been the firm’s president for

the past twenty years. Our design training was a

collision between the beaux arts and the modern

movement. We were inspired by both the old way

and the new way, but we were definitely modernists

at heart.

After being exposed at school to the culture clash

between the beaux arts, the moderns, and the

beatniks, I searched for leaders to give voice to what

had become most important to me—bioregionalism. I

was particularly fascinated by the writings of Aldo

Leopold, who described land as a community versus a

commodity. I studied the nineteenth-century Jesuit

poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who wrote about the

“inscape” as the essence of a place that creates an

energy that actualizes visual perceptions in the eye

and mind—what Yi-Fu Tuan, the great scholar of

landscape aesthetics and perception, has called the

“resonance of an image.” I found W. G. Hoskins’s

Previous: Jones & Jones’s flow chart of visual resource

management for highways as published in Landscape

Architecture magazine, 1978

Left: Grant Jones on the tideflats beneath the sea bluffs of

admiralty inlet on Whidbey island

Right: the tidal f lats in richmond Beach

15influenCes

book The Making of the English Landscape, which

describes various types of regional landscapes and

helped me understand that our environments are

made up of intrinsic geologies, hydrologies, and

cultural processes. Thus I began to see the regional

landscape for what it literally was—a series of

physiographic puzzle pieces—and learned that by

mapping and naming the pieces, I could create a

bioregional analog to structural linguistics. In 1961 I

decided to foster my interest in poetry and started

studying under the American poet Theodore Roethke.

I was one of his poets for three years until he died. At

the same time I was also working for the landscape

architect Richard Haag, a great friend and mentor.

At school Haag had been a tremendously

influential faculty member. He was one of Hideo

Sasaki’s best friends during the fifties and had worked

for Lawrence Halprin in San Francisco before moving

up to Seattle to join the landscape architecture

department at the University of Washington. Haag

often took us on field trips to the Pike Place Market,

where we would work on urban design projects,

trying to capture the spaces and the aesthetics of the

market life. After studying the kinesthetic experience

of the market, we built a machine to replicate it. It

consisted of long scrolls of paper with different

textures, which were mounted on a large drumlike

structure that was connected to a long pole with a

bicycle wheel in the center. We hung the scroll, put

members of the faculty inside the machine, and then

spun it. Patterns started to flow, mimicking the

experience of driving a car when scenes start blurring

together. The machine thus captured all the motion

and rhythms of the market. The faculty members

were totally perplexed, but we learned lessons about

how to record and communicate perceptions of place.

After college Haag convinced me to go to Harvard

for a graduate degree in landscape architecture. One

of my first teachers besides Hideo Sasaki and Norman

Newton was Charles Eliot III, grandson of Charles

Eliot, who had worked with the Olmsted brothers.

Eliot gave us a wonderful interdisciplinary project, an

a sketch by Jones illustrating intrinsic

environmental qualities of richmond Beach

16 Conversat ions

Pike Place kin-aesthetics analysis by Grant Jones, ilze Jones,

and Mark Kabush, students of richard Haag, university of

Washington, 1960

17influenCes

evaluation of the state of Massachusetts that

combined landscape architecture, regional planning,

and urban design. In my proposal I outlined a

recreational open space network that would

strengthen the economy of Massachusetts by

focusing on the scenery and the aesthetic quality of

the state. Another Harvard professor that greatly

influenced me was Peter Hornbeck, a naturalist who

seemed to know everything about every plant, flower,

herb, grass, snake, or insect. He helped me objectify

how close one can get to nature.

The year I graduated, 1966, I won the Frederick

Sheldon Traveling Fellowship. I was the first design

student to receive the fellowship since Tommy

Church had won it in 1939. Before I left for my trip,

two classmates (Ray Belknap and John Furtado) and I

worked on a research project with Hornbeck. We had

helped secure $20,000 from the Conservation

Foundation to study three landscape scholars who

were dealing with the regional landscape at that time:

Ian McHarg from the University of Pennsylvania,

Philip Lewis from the University of Wisconsin, and

Angus Hills from the Ontario Department of Lands

and Forests. All three had developed prototypes for

hierarchical land evaluations. Lewis was the first to

map intrinsic landscape features, particularly along

rivers, while McHarg worked with a more holistic

system of transparent overlays to determine best

placement for development versus environmental

protection. These three regionalists who created

models to categorize inherent characteristics of the

land deeply impacted me.

JA: In the mid-1960s, at the threshold between

academia and practice, the Sheldon Fellowship

offered the first opportunity for you to establish a

critical voice in the profession. Did you achieve

this? You later wrote in your 1975 manifesto

“Design as Ecogram” that “the poet whose

responsibility was to discover and give meaning to

life has been replaced by the ecologist,” but at the

same time, you quoted Wystan Auden to say, “the

regional analysis of proposed recreational open

space in Massachusetts by Jones, under the

instruction of Charles eliot iii , Harvard university

Graduate school of Design, 1964

18 Conversat ions

19influenCes

machine through a sort of general technoic

anesthesia has replaced our interdependence with

nature.” These words seem to question human

capacity to hear and respond to what Jones &

Jones calls the voice of the landscape.

GJ: My Sheldon Fellowship proposal promulgated the

need to catalog city forms, regional architectures, and

material cultures that had evolved adaptively to real

places and real ecologies, and to use these adaptations

as models for shaping a better fit for sprawling

modern communities. The idea of environmental

determinism, a phrase that was first used by cultural

anthropologists in the 1930s, had acquired slight

disrepute because it seemed to indicate that people

are a product of their environment. This distrust of

Social Darwinism had developed partially because it

had been used by the Nazis to prove that Aryans were

superior. It was my belief that misappropriations of

the idea really wrecked the perfectly wonderful

notion that people, plants, and animals all evolved

from specifics of place. My proposal to the Sheldon

committee was to travel to South America, where I

would search for cultural adaptations to the different

bioclimatic zones that stack skyward from sea level up

through the Andes.

The Sheldon trip took me to the Galapagos

Islands, where I learned firsthand from Darwin’s

finches. Darwin noticed that as finches moved to

outer islands, they developed evolutionary adaptive

mutations to new contextual conditions. The

fundamental structure of Jones & Jones’s design

practice works in a similar fashion—we’ve always

tried to adjust our design approach to the specific

context of each project. As a design practice, we are

constantly responding to changing pressures in the

environment and evolving to develop innovative

approaches to new problems. Our practice is reactive

and contingent, it’s methodologically consistent in

its adaptivity but not stylistically consistent.

Because of a military junta Ilze and I ended up

getting stuck on the island for nearly six weeks,

Opposite: on the Galapagos islands Jones researched

cultural adaptations to different bioclimatic zones.

20 Conversat ions

sketch by Jones of cultural adaptations to the bioregional

conditions of finca-Cauquillo in the Cauca valley region of

Colombia, 1967

21influenCes

subsisting at the Charles Darwin Research Station. We

couldn’t even contact our parents to let them know

where we were. It was tough at the time but in

retrospect, it was a wonderful retreat. We went out

every week with different scientists to study birds,

reptiles, and insects. In a philosophical way, the

Sheldon Fellowship shaped the future of our practice.

My travels confirmed to me that ecology and poetry

are equally valid ways of describing the world we

experience. As cultural expressions, they are closely

aligned, as are intrinsic landscapes and community

values. I certainly hope that realization has been a

critical contribution to the profession.

JA: In a recent interview firm cofounder Ilze Jones

said that the intentions of Jones & Jones have

remained consistent from the beginning: to

promote the objective integration of cultural and

natural values and connectivity at all scales. This

efficient description of nearly forty years of

practice somehow is broad enough to accurately

depict a multi-discipline, multi-partnered

operation that aggressively avoids stylistic

categorization. Describe the structure of your

practice and some of your early projects.

GJ: I established Jones & Jones in 1969 with Ilze. As I

mentioned earlier, we came of age in the Beat

Generation and were greatly influenced by Beat

writers, but also by scientists who advocated

bioregionalism.

Our first job was an urban plaza called Occidental

Square, near our newly opened offices in the old

Globe Hotel in the Pioneer Square section of Seattle.

We wanted to create the first European cobblestone

square in the West and connect it outward with a

tree-lined open space system. On the working

drawings we wrote that paving materials would be

provided free of charge by the owner since our budget

was limited to only $60,000. When asked where those

materials would come from, we replied that they were

already on the streets, covered with asphalt. We

22 Conversat ions

ilze Jones and arthur skolnik, the Pioneer square District

manager, sorting street cobbles for occidental square,

seattle, 1970

23influenCes

Pioneer square District master plan, Jones & Jones,

1970. occidental square occupies the open space

at the district’s center.