Strive: Jones Studio Adventures in Architecture

STRIVE explores Jones Studio’s four decades of work bringing inventive design to our built environment. The firm samples from ancient global architecture and the pragmatics of the American School, from the realities of today’s climate change to nature’s healing truths, to create a unique modernism of place. Nature is a primary partner and collaborator in Jones Studio’s work. Firm founder Eddie Jones, brother Neal Jones and partners Brian Farling and Jacob Benyi express the preciousness of water and light in the Sonoran Desert and beyond. Water performs, literally and figuratively, across Jones Studio’s projects, bringing interior and exterior “desert gardens” to life.Jones Studio attributes their success to the “Family Table”, a shared space that facilitates high levels of collaboration and fearless invention, and a persistent forward momentum fueled by risk-taking, to solve the problems of different building typologies. Essays on 30+ built and unbuilt projects, public art projects and exhibitions trace Jones Studio’s solutions to how we might re-shape our cultural landscape in an environmentally challenged world.

Eddie M. Jones, AIA, NCARB / Founder (1979)It was morning, June 8, 1979. Instead of leaving for his day job with the oldest firm in Arizona, Eddie calmly stepped outside his home and glued eleven letters beside the door.

So began JONES STUDIO: in the spare bedroom, leaking roof, no money, and one brave client.

Five years later Eddie’s younger brother, Neal, joined him, completing their childhood dream of work-ing together and forever changing the scale of the practice.

Forty plus years forward, Eddie’s persistence and innovation have expanded the palette of materials and methods available throughout Arizona. His long-standing implementation of sustainability and environmental design, matched with an extraordinary sensitivity to the factors that create space, have made better human experiences and better architecture.

Under Eddie Jones’ leadership, Jones Studio has received 222 design awards including a National AIA and a GSA Design Excellence Honor for the Mariposa Land Port of Entry in Nogales, Arizona. In 2018 Eddie was awarded the AIA Arizona’s Architects Medal, the highest honor an individual practi-tioner of architecture can receive in the state.

Eddie is a 2004 recipient of the Melvin R. Lohmann Medal (for career achievement in architecture) from his alma mater, Oklahoma State University. The Lohmann Medal is the highest honor bestowed on a graduate of the College of Engineering, Architecture, and Technology. Soon after, Eddie also became an inductee of the College of Engineering, Architecture, and Technology Hall of Fame. Although state rivals, the University of Oklahoma College of Architecture named Eddie the Bruce Goff Chair in 1999. For the fiftieth anniversary of the iconic Progressive Architecture Awards, he was specially selected to be a member of the esteemed jury.

Eddie was appointed in 2007 to the GSA Design Excellence Peer Review. He was named a Found-ing Board of Governors member by The School of Architecture at Taliesin in 2017. He is very active in Arizona Forward, Arizona’s premier organization for promoting sustainable design. Eddie also hosts many community events at the new office building, completed in 2016 to serve as a model of sustainability in desert environments.

There are currently 40 books, 227 magazines and journals, 29 TV shows, various radio programs, one Hollywood movie and one documentary film including the Studio’s works.

Recently, Eddie Jones realized his day job was again with one of the oldest firms in Arizona.

Marilu Knode is a curator of contemporary global art living in St. Louis. She has worked at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Newport Harbor Art Museum, inova (the Institute of Visual Arts), Milwaukee, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and F.A.R. (Future Arts Research) @ ASU. She is currently Executive Director at the Laumeier Sculpture Park, St. Louis and Aronson Endowed Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Interests include contemporary artistic commissions, art in public spaces, global cultural sustainability and gardens.

Marlon Blackwell FAIA is a practicing architect in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and serves as the E. Fay Jones Distinguished Professor at the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas. Blackwell is the recipient of the 2020 AIA Gold Medal. He was a 2019 Resident Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, inducted into the 2018 National Academy of Design, and selected as a 2014 United States Artists Ford Fellow. Work produced in his professional office (MBA), has received national and international recognition with significant publication in books, architectural journals and magazines and more than 140 domestic and international awards. MBA received the 2016 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in Architecture.

Oscar Riera Ojeda is an editor and designer based in the US, China, and Argentina. Born in 1966, in Buenos Aires, he moved to the United States in 1990. Since then, he has published over three hundred books, assembling a remarkable body of work notable for its thoroughness of content, timeless character, and sophisticated and innovative craftsmanship. • Oscar Riera Ojeda’s books have been published by many prestigious publishing houses across the world, including Birkhäuser, Byggförlaget, The Monacelli Press, Gustavo Gili, Thames & Hudson, Rizzoli, Damiani, Page One, ORO editions, Whitney Library of Design, and Taschen. • Oscar Riera Ojeda is also the creator of numerous architectural book series, including Ten Houses, Contemporary World Architects, The New American House and The New American Apartment, Architecture in Detail, and Single Building. • His work has received many international awards, in-depth reviews, and citations. He is a regular contributor and consultant for several publications in the field. • In 2001 Oscar Riera Ojeda founded ORO Editions, a company at which he was responsible for the completion of nearly one hundred titles. In 2008 he established his current publishing venture, Oscar Riera Ojeda Publishers, a firm with fifteen employees and locations across three continents.