Frank Harmon, a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects (FAIA), is founder and principal at Frank Harmon Architect in Raleigh, North Carolina.  

Harmon will present a lecture at 4:30 p.m. Monday, Jan. 27, in Ken and Linda Sue Shollmier Hall, Room 250 of Vol Walker Hall, on the U of A campus, as part of a special event in the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design’s spring series of lectures and events. 

As part of this special event recognizing what would have been the 104th birthday of Fay Jones (born Jan. 31, 1921), the Fay Jones School will honor Harmon as the third recipient of the Fay Jones School Legacy Medal in Architecture. This award has been conceived to honor and extend the legacy of the school’s namesake, the architect E. Fay Jones, and his work in Arkansas, for the greater region, and for the United States and internationally. Previous recipients were David Salmela and David McKee in 2024.  

In his lecture, “Writing and Sketching as Keys to Design,” Harmon will discuss how people tell stories to help make sense of the world. Designers can also use storytelling to help them design. Harmon will explore how writing about one’s values clearly and simply can allow designers to realize those values in three dimensions.  

Sketching is another form of storytelling, and designers can use sketching to help them understand what they see and experience.  

His talk is based on the belief that writing and hand-drawing are not obsolete skills, and that both allow architects to develop a natural grace in the way they design projects and engage with the world around them. 

Harmon has designed sustainable modern buildings across the Southeast for 40 years. He discovered architecture as a child playing in the streams and woods of his native Greensboro, North Carolina.  

Recognized nationally as a leader in modern, sustainable, regionally appropriate design, Harmon's work engages pressing contemporary issues such as placelessness, sustainability, and restoration of cities and nature.  

Ranging from small sheds and houses to 70,000-square-foot corporate headquarters and LEED-certified environmental education facilities, his buildings are always specific to their sites and use materials such as hurricane-felled cypress and rock from local quarries to connect them to their landscapes. Airy breezeways, outdoor living spaces, deep overhangs, and unpainted wood embody the vernacular legacy of the South while maintaining a distinguished modernism.  

In the spring of 2013, Harmon launched “Native Places,” an online journal (nativeplaces.org) for which he uses hand-drawn sketches and 200-word essays to examine the relationship between nature and built structures. In October 2018, selections from the journal became his first book, Native Places: Drawing as a Way to See (ORO Editions, publisher), with the foreword by Tod Williams.  

Harmon is a graduate of the Architectural Association in London. He has taught at the North Carolina State University College of Design and the Architectural Association, and he has served as a visiting critic at Harvard University, the University of Virginia, and Auburn University’s Rural Studio. 

A recipient of the AIA North Carolina Gold Medal for Architectural Design, his buildings have been published often and have garnered more than 200 design awards. 

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.