Housing the Human and the Sacred: Fay Jones and Mid-Century Modern in the Ozarks

FAIN: MN-268955-20

University of Arkansas, Fayetteville (Fayetteville, AR 72701-1201)
Greg Herman (Project Director: June 2019 to June 2023)

Production of an interactive website and kiosk display about twentieth-century American architect Fay Jones (1921–2004).

Thorncrown Chapel (1980) is a recognized masterpiece, but the affinities between Thorncrown and the houses of Fay Jones have little public recognition, and in most cases, the houses cannot be visited. However, the houses share Thorncrown’s spiritual quality: for Jones, housing the human and the housing the sacred are fundamentally connected. This project aims to bring the architecture of Fay Jones to a broad public audience through an immersive, game-like application published to the web and to a set of four kiosks which will rotate through public locations in the Ozarks region. Through six chapters, focusing on five houses and Thorncrown, the application will unfold the central theme in Jones’ work: the interconnection of body/self, the social, and the natural world, and how the relationships between them can be mutually sustaining. This is not an architecture of display or consumption, but a serious, thoughtful, and ongoing challenge for how we humans dwell in the world.