About the Project

Completed by Fay Jones in 1980, Thorncrown is widely recognized as a masterpiece of American architecture, regional in inspiration and materials, but international in significance. A spiritual structure, it is the product of a quarter-century of innovation and refinement by Jones in the houses designed for clients in the Ozarks region, beginning with his own house in 1956. As Jones himself put it, architects have “the power and responsibility to shape new physical and spatial forms in the landscape--forms that will sustain and nourish and express that all-important intangible, the human condition at its spiritual best.” From this perspective, the architecture of Fay Jones consists almost entirely of dwellings, for the human and the sacred. Clear thematic and spiritual lines run between his residential work and the chapels, suggesting that he viewed housing the human and housing the sacred in very similar terms. This is not a coercive theology, but a sensitive, sustained interworking of landscape, space, and natural elements to illuminate a reconsideration of human social relations on the micro-scale of the body and the house, and the spiritual drive for transcendence at the macro-scale of nature. In our current global context, these are things we might well reconsider. In its tone and themes the architecture of Fay Jones has never been more relevant.
Funded by a Digital Projects for the Public grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, this project aims to bring key themes in the architecture of Fay Jones to greater public awareness through an immersive, game-like web application and three interactive kiosks. One of these kiosks will be resident on the University of Arkansas campus, while the other two will move to different locations in NW Arkansas and the region. The web application follows the journey of a fictional architecture student dealing with a challenging assignment for their History of Architecture class: they must visit, sketch, and respond to four significant Fay Jones’ projects: the Shaheen - Goodfellow House aka Stoneflower (1965), the Fay and Gus Jones House (1955), the Sequoyah project (1956), and Thorncrown (1980). As the journey unfolds from spring to summer, fall, and winter a central question emerges: informed by the example of Fay Jones–shortcomings and disillusionment as well as transcendence–what can architecture do now to heal the relation between the human and the natural world?