Susan Jones, FAIA, LEED BD+C, is a practicing architect and the founder of atelierjones, an architecture and urban design firm. Founded in 2003, the firm’s work entwines design, research, and community engagement to create projects of urban reclamation: of sites, buildings, materials, waste, and ways of living. With her clients and her staff, her projects seek out sites and materials with inherent but underutilized value – to harvest their embodied energy, their catalytic power for owners and communities, and their beauty. In 2015, atelierjones completed the highly acclaimed CLTHouse, one of the first in the US, and was recently selected to design Pike Station, a highly sustainable live/work loft project targeting net-zero water use. atelierjones’ Bellevue First Congregational Church, also one of the larger commercial CLT projects in the US, is under construction and scheduled to be completed in early 2016.
Jones’s work has been recognized by numerous national, regional, and local design awards, including an AIA National Honor Award. Her work has been published nationally and internationally. Licensed in over 15 states, she has been a visiting design professor and critic at numerous universities. In 1999, she was made the first woman partner of the large firm, nbbj. She resigned her position to start atelierjones in 2003.
Jones earned her B.A. from Stanford in Philosophy, and her M.Arch from the Harvard GSD in 1988. She became a Fellow of the AIA in 2010 and was awarded a UW Runstad Research Fellowship in 2013. Originally from Bellingham, Washington, she has traveled extensively, living in San Francisco, Boston, Vienna, Berlin, Catania, Sicily, and Sri Lanka. Currently she lives in Seattle with her husband, Marco, and their two teenage children, Rogan and Domenica.