Early Life and Influences
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).
In 1966, Jones won Harvard’s Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellowship and spent the next two years exploring South America and Europe, searching for examples of regionally distinctive community planning, architecture, and culture. As Sheldon Fellow, Jones sought to revitalize the concept of environmental determinism, the idea that plants, animals, and people—as well as human culture and language—all evolve from their landscape, or physical environment. He also sought to demonstrate that the study of diverse cultural and architectural adaptations to place could serve as a model to improve development practices in American communities (Amidon, 19).
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