Roy Mason (architect)

In 1996, at age 57, he was killed by a man named Christopher Robin Hatton at the architect's home in the 4200 block of Military Road NW. Christopher Robin Hatton was supposedly a close acquaintance of Roy Mason. A month after the slaying, the killer was still on the run and hunted by the police. Christopher Hatton, in a drug-induced rage and demanding money from Mason, bludgeoned Mason with a hammer twenty-five times (per the autopsy). Christopher Robin Hatton was sentenced to fourteen years for the murder of Roy Mason.

Mason worked and lived most of his life in and around Washington, D.C. Mason's lover of many years, Brian Carneal, died in 1995 of complications related to HIV. When Mason wasn't in Washington, D.C., he and Carneal resided in Delaware at their Dupont Estate.

Mason was interested in futuristic homes that use alternative materials which make it easier to build homes and more affordable. He developed foam-built homes, including the Mushroom House in Bethesda, MD outside Washington, D.C in 1974. The architect Paul Rudolph would call Roy Mason "the marshmallow architect" because of the fluffy outcome of foam-built houses. The Xanadu House belongs to the Blobitecture style.

In 1971, he designed a sprayed foam building for an experimental college called College of the Potomac in Paris, Virginia, in 1971. In 1978, Mason created plans for a fifty-home community of solar-powered houses in Columbia, Maryland, that was to be called "Solar Village". In the 1980s, Mason was the architecture editor of the Futurist magazine and the first executive director of the Home Automation Association.

In 1966, he was a founding member of the World Future Society and the publisher of Futurist Magazine for which he co-designed their first logo inspired by the Tomoe. During the mid 1980s, Mason Roy was enveloped into the strategic business plan process of Intelligent Building Information Systems (iBis), an Arlington-based subsidiary of Bell System, and became a spokesman for the company.

Roy Mason (June 29, 1938 – May 19, 1996) was an American lecturer, writer, and futuristic architect who designed and built a variety of futuristic homes and other buildings in the 1970s and 1980s using low cost materials and alternative energy sources. Mason invented architronics as exemplified in the Xanadu House.