Johnpaul Jones

Jones married fellow University of Oregon student Hannah Stratton in 1965. They had two children, Sequoiah and Ingrid, and divorced in 1990. Jones married for a second time to Marjorie Sheldon on September 21, 1997.

Since the 1980s, Jones has been involved in increasing diversity in the architectural and design professions. With David Fukui, Tom Kubota, Mel Streeter, and Marga Rose Hancock he co-founded the AIA Seattle Diversity Roundtable. Among other things, the Roundtable organized school outreach and established scholarships at the University of Washington. He has also worked on diversity initiatives at the University of Oregon, and is involved in the American Indian Council of Architects and Engineers and the National Association of Indian Architects and Engineers.

After graduating in 1967, he moved in Seattle, working briefly for Paul Thiry, then at Dersham & Dimmick, before opening a practice on Bainbridge Island. He became increasingly involve in Native American matters, joining the Urban Indian Committee, where he first came to know Native activist Bernie Whitebear. In the early 1970s, he met landscape architect Grant Richard Jones (no relation), who was studying the Native American burial mounds of the Midwest. In 1973, he joined Grant Jones and Grant's then-wife Ilze Jones at Jones & Jones, based in the Globe Building in Seattle's Pioneer Square neighborhood.

Although he did poorly in school other than excelling in art classes and physical education, he managed to graduate from high school in 1959, and attended San Jose City College. A job as an office boy at architecture firm Higgins & Root in San Jose, combined with his drawing skills set him on the first steps of his career. With help from his boss Chester Root he entered the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon, where for the first time he became a serious student, and where he began his interest in Native American architecture, more neglected in the U. of O. curriculum of the time than not. He continued to work summers at Higgins & Root.

Johnpaul Jones (born July 24, 1941) is an American architect and landscape architect, partner in Seattle-based architecture firm Jones & Jones Architects and Landscape Architects, best known for innovative habitat immersion method design of zoo exhibits. A Native American himself, he has also executed many projects for various Native American organizations, and was lead design consultant for the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian, completed 2004 in Washington, D.C. He was the first architect ever to receive the National Humanities Medal.