In an architectural world freaked out on speed and hype, Fay Jones stood apart. His residences, chapels, and pavilions form a discernible body of work as singular and distinctive as their maker. In a sense, Jones ennobled and quickened Arkansas, an emerging region near America’s core, and the place shifted from near-frontier to the kingdom of Thorncrown, a wonderland of natural gifts and shifting light. We saw this focused world anew through his eyes.

The press has eulogized his personal qualities, including his forthright, democratic manner, his dignity, his energetic awareness, his role as an inspiring teacher, and his professional alliances with great minds, including Frank Lloyd Wright and Bruce Goff. (Who else worked with and learned from both?) Jones’s greatest lesson for subsequent generations, however, lies outside the so-called “Ozark style,” characterized by wood and stone; instead, his real legacy lies within his work and its relationship to language. Fay Jones thought and spoke most eloquently in three dimensions, a lesson at the core of architectural meaning. Few have mastered it more completely.