Susan Jones, FAIA, is founder and architect at atelierjones, an all-woman-owned/woman-led architecture and urban design firm in Seattle, Washington. Her work has been recognized by national, regional and local design awards, including a national AIA Honor Award, and has been published nationally and internationally.

Jones will present a lecture at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 13, in Ken and Linda Sue Shollmier Hall, Room 250 of Vol Walker Hall, on the University of Arkansas campus, as part of the spring lecture series in the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design.

In her lecture, “Disruptive Ecologies,” Jones will discuss her firm’s work over the past two decades to bring lower carbon sustainable pathways of architecture into the built environment, from the design of buildings and communities to forest ecological research.

Ten years ago, Jones designed a small home for her family. Noting the privilege that entailed, atelierjones decided to design a prototypical house helping demonstrate a new sustainable design strategy: lowering embodied carbon to create decarbonized buildings. In 2015, the CLT House was built. CLT (cross-laminated timber) is an engineered wood panel product made from layers of lumber glued together in alternating directions. The CLT House was one of just a handful of mass timber structures in the United States. A year later, atelierjones completed their CLT Church, a 49,000-square-foot adaptive reuse of a 1970s office building into a congregational church with a sanctuary wall of CLT. The firm won regional and national design awards for these projects, adding to multiple awards the firm had won for previous work since its inception in 2003.

In 2016, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and the International Code Council (ICC) took note. They extended an invitation to Jones to join the Ad Hoc Committee on Tall Wood Buildings to rewrite and change the ICC building codes to allow tall mass timber buildings from eight to 18 stories. Jones accepted the three-year commitment reluctantly, knowing that the pro-bono code committee work would take significant time.

Jones and her 17 fellow code committee members collaborated to create more than 200 pages of new code language and three new code types. Critical to this legal codification was the design of five full-scale, real-life fire tests to apply data and science to the life-safety questions raised by the committee. The codes passed by wide margins in 2018, were ratified in 2019, and then adopted in states and cities across the United States.

In 2019, the firm designed the first eight-story mass timber building in the country, using the Type IV-C code that Jones helped write. The 67,000-square-foot building, Heartwood, was completed in 2023. A workforce housing project for a non-profit housing provider, Heartwood provides 126 units on a tight urban site in Seattle.

The extraordinary impact of this devoted work, over a decade of design, research and collaborations, forged both disruptions and trajectories of the future, bringing mass timber into architectural, engineering and construction communities across the United States. This was made possible through the considerable sacrifice and constant innovation that is the lifeblood of atelierjones, its current staff, and more than 50 diverse and devoted former employees.

Today, atelierjones works exclusively on mass timber projects, from housing to cultural projects, to creative offices, to single-family residences, using a broad toolbox of lower-carbon strategies wherever possible, to reduce operational and embodied carbon. The firm continues to lead this important work to usher in a new 21st century era of both lower-carbon buildings and more sustainable forestry practices across the country.

A third-generation native of the Pacific Northwest, Jones grew up in Bellingham, Washington, and raised her family in Seattle. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Stanford University and a Master of Architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Licensed in multiple states, she is Affiliate Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Washington. She was made a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 2010 and was awarded the AIA Seattle Gold Medal in 2023.

This is the Miller Boskus Lack Architects Endowed Lecture in Wood Design and Construction.

The school is pursuing continuing education credits for this lecture through the American Institute of Architects.

This lecture is free and open to the public. Seating is limited.