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Grant Jones, founding principal of the noted landscape architecture firm Jones & Jones, has practiced ecological design for more than 30 years and has been a pioneer in river planning, scenic highway design, zoo design, and landscape aesthetics. The latest addition to our successful Source Books in Landscape Architecture series, Grant Jones/Jones & Jones ILARIS, focuses on Jones's "green print" plan for Puget Sound in Washington State. Working in collaboration with the Trust for Public Lands and using new GIS technology, Jones & Jones developed the software tool ILARIS. This CAD-like tool helps to evaluate the aesthetic resources of landscape regions and is used as a basis for future planning. The Puget Sound model can be applied to other landscapes at risk. Including an interview with Grant Jones, critical essays discussing his work, as well as numerous diagrams, plans, and photographs, Grant Jones/Jones & Jones ILARIS is a thorough study of an important project.
Citation preview
4Source Books in
Landscape Architecture
Jane Amidon, Series Editor
Grant Jones / Jones & JonesILARIS:The Puget Sound Plan
Published by
Princeton Architectural Press
37 East Seventh Street
New York, New York 10003
For a free catalog of books, call 1.800.722.6657.
Visit our website at www.papress.com.
© 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.