Conversations With The Land -- Architect Johnpaul Jones Infuses A New Smithsonian Museum With `The Way Of The People'

SOMETHING UNUSUAL will happen late next month at what might ordinarily be called the "groundbreaking" for a new branch of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

The building - the National Museum of the American Indian - will be the most important in the history of Native Americans, on one of the most prized pieces of real estate in the country: the last vacant ground in the Capitol Mall. The $110 million structure, to be finished in 2001, will sit at the foot of the Capitol, next to the Air and Space Museum, across from I.M. Pei's dramatic wing of the National Gallery of Art.

The museum's ceremony of beginning will not be a groundbreaking, however. No ground will be broken.

Rather, there will be what the museum's chief designer, Seattle architect Johnpaul Jones, calls "a conversation with the land."

Jones not only talks to the land, he listens - to the flowers and trees, the animals, the dirt itself. As an architect with Native American roots, his listening and his skill have, over the past three decades, created a unique body of work - outdoor designs, zoos and Indian projects - and a national reputation.

Jones, a tall, handsome man with gray, swept-back hair and the presence of an enduring chief, lives on Bainbridge Island in a modern version of a tree house, surrounded by the art work of Northwest coastal Indians and overlooking Rich Passage, waters they once navigated.

He is a partner in the innovative Seattle architectural firm of

Jones and Jones, which he joined after Ilze and Grant Jones founded it.

"All three of us wanted to give the land a voice," said Grant Jones, whose pioneering work at the Woodland Park Zoo saved animals from weary, cage-trotting existences and saved the zoo in the process.

Johnpaul Jones' individual reputation has grown with the wonderful polar-bear habitat at Point Defiance Zoo, the Asian elephant house and gorilla exhibit at Woodland Park and zoo projects in Belize, Ghana, Honolulu, San Diego and Perth, Australia. He designed Harriet Bullitt's Sleeping Lady retreat near Wenatchee, the Longhouse Educational and Cultural Center at The Evergreen State College, the Institute of American Indian Art in Santa Fe and, now, the Smithsonian museum.

"If you step back and look at the history of 20th-century architecture," said Robert Melnick, dean of the architecture school at the University of Oregon, from which Jones graduated, "those who have made a difference have stepped out of line.

"I think Johnpaul Jones and the firm of Jones and Jones are doing that. Johnpaul is special because he never thinks about architecture without thinking about the environment, the land and the people."

JONES HAD BEEN practicing for several years when he first began working on Native American projects - including Daybreak Star Center at Discovery Park and Tillicum Place in downtown Seattle - and with native leaders.

In one sense, this was a late awakening of a native heritage rooted in Oklahoma. Jones remembers that the Oregon School of Architecture's annual spring party was called a potlatch - a name that meant little to him then. His classes at Oregon never addressed the influence of America's indigenous peoples, and not since his childhood, when his grandmother kept alive stories of the Choctaw and Cherokee peoples, had he even thought about being Indian.

In another sense, Jones' native heritage was part of his work all along.

"I think most native people have a strong intuitive side," said Rick West, director of the National Museum of the American Indian. "Johnpaul has a natural empathy with things native and with native people."

The approach is holistic - what Native Americans call "the way of the people," a collective caring for the animals, the land, the people and their spirits.

Jones says he was profoundly affected by a sculpture by native artist Bill Reid, which he described in an article for an architectural journal:

"The large black canoe is filled with animals, spirits, humans and plant forms - the canoe is totally full. It sits in shallow water, reflecting dark shapes. I've not seen the four worlds of Indian people so visibly brought together before in one place. There is hardly any room in the canoe; it is full of wolf and wolf tails, cedar hats and human paddlers, a beaver paddler, and a bear spirit hanging onto a human who is part animal spirit. The oneness of its message is `the way of the people.' "

As a contemporary zoo architect, Jones hurts for the whale killed by the Makahs, for whom he designed an elder center more than 20 years ago, but understands the historic relationship between animal and man.

Perhaps, for him, it is best said in his description of the Indian village:

"The Indian knows for the village and feels for the village. The village is not a strip of land or a reservation. The villages are the people's winter stories and the winds and the rains. The river is the village, and the black and white whales that herd the fish. The village is the salmon who comes up the river to spawn, and the seal who follows the salmon. The village is you."

His description is of quiet things - sensitivity to surroundings and people, the instinct to listen, to be basically without ego - and those quiet things rather ironically have pushed Jones onto the national stage.

"He listens as loudly as he speaks," said West, the museum director. "I admire his humility as much as his talent. He is completely self-effacing."

When Jones was asked by Native American students at the University of Oregon to design a longhouse, he showed up without a single drawing. He asked what mattered to them. It would not be his design, but their design.

JONES WAS RAISED among women, and he listens to and respects them. The Indian way is to have women involved in important matters. They keep the Indian history. The final design team for the Smithsonian is made up of two men and two women, a balance.

"Johnpaul has a vast knowledge of Indian sensibilities," said Ramona Sakietewa, a Hopi artist and member of the team. "He is a very dear man, who lives by his word. He has a great and very wonderful presence."

Sakietewa smiled.

"Over the years, we've called him The Hunk. Women cross the room when we're having dinner to talk to him. It is not a situation with which he seems comfortable, however."

Jones, 57, spends weekends on Bainbridge and in San Diego with his second wife, Marjorie, director of marketing for the San Diego Zoological Society. He has two children, Ingrid, 31, and Sequoia, 28, a Bainbridge Island firefighter.

Traditionally, Indian art has been produced more by the group than by an individual, with designs that express function. The new American Indian museum comes from that tradition.

Next to the Air and Space Museum, all angles and glass, it will be rounded, smooth and soaring, reminiscent of canyons of the Southwest and the peoples who lived along its walls.

Jones was part of the original design team for the museum, headed by well-known Douglas Cardinal, a Blackfoot from Canada, who did early renderings but was fired by the Smithsonian after a long contract dispute.

"There was tremendous pressure on Johnpaul to peel away from the project because of his association with Douglas Cardinal," West said. "But he showed tremendous commitment to the importance of this building to the Native American community."

The original exterior of the design may be Cardinal's, but the setting and the spirit of the place come from Jones.

"There is not an aspect of the museum he has not commented on," said West, a Cheyenne, lawyer and Harvard graduate. "He combines an elegant sense of design with deep concern for the function of space, and the needs of both humans and the land, characteristics not common to many great architects."

Atop the museum will be a dome. Beneath the dome will be a large community area where Indians do what they do and have always done - dance, sing, weave baskets, prepare meals, share.

In the early discussions, Jones turned a shallow Pueblo basket upside down and said, "The dome should be this shallow shape, not high like a European dome."

GROWING UP AMID alcoholism and poverty, Jones always understood and found solace in animals, talked to them, sketched them, included them in his village, even if he didn't know it was a village yet.

In Oklahoma, it wasn't good to be Indian. The family moved to California and outwardly mixed unobtrusively with Mexicans, picking fruit, cutting the tops off onions, doing its best to survive.

Within the family, Jones' grandmother, Pearl Gurley, spoke of the spirit and the natural world around them.

Later, first as an architect and then an Indian, Jones remembered and began conversing with the animals, with the dirt.

The conversation could be striking. In a ceremony for the construction of a longhouse in Olympia, in the presence of tribal elders from across the state, he said:

"We have just not come to build on this site, but first to speak to it, and then explain our intentions. We promise to use the site wisely and not deviate from our promise. We are making a pact with a living thing. We ask the site not be angry if we did remove some trees, and thank it for its sacrifice."

A poster hangs on the wall of Johnpaul's space at Jones and Jones, in the bricks and timbers of what was an old hotel above the Elliott Bay Book Co. in Pioneer Square.

It pictures a couple of dozen pairs of moccasins, all different, pointing in many directions. The caption says, "All roads are good."

"I believe that," he said.

Though good, Jones' road was not easy.

Dyslexic, he labored in school in San Jose, where the family moved from the fields of Stockton and Manteca. He favored the obscurity of shop classes and emerged from them with his ability to draw. He began to focus on drafting as a career, and then architecture.

Along the way, he became a top-notch swimmer and water-polo player. He was promised an athletic scholarship to the University of California at Berkeley but couldn't complete the foreign-language requirement for admission.

There was help. He had applied for a job with a local architecture firm. He arrived at 9 a.m. and waited until one of the principals, Chester Root, showed up after noon.

"If you want the job that badly, you can have it," said Root, who became enchanted by the sensitive young man.

In his time, Root had been sponsored to study architecture at Harvard. He endowed a scholarship at Cal, but when Jones couldn't get in there, he suggested Oregon and gave the young man a round-trip airplane ticket to Eugene.

Thirty-three years later, Jones told a graduating class of Oregon architecture students:

"As I remember it, the grass alongside the road from the old Eugene Airport seemed greener than any place I had ever seen."

PROFESSIONALLY, Jones struggled at first in Seattle. At one point he paid medical bills for his first wife, Hannah, with sketches he had made of ferry boats sitting in the Eagle Harbor maintenance yard on Bainbridge Island.

He worked for himself for a time but then came into contact with the other Joneses. The atmosphere, the synergy, were perfect.

"Johnpaul sees the land as a living thing," said Grant Jones. "When he puts on his architect hat, he sees buildings as guests visiting the land for a while. He wants buildings to be comfortable for those who use it."

There is no more satisfied customer than Harriet Bullitt, the Seattle philanthropist for whom he designed the award-winning Sleeping Lady retreat and convention center on the site of a rundown boys camp near Wenatchee.

"I knew how I wanted people to feel, but I didn't know what the building should look like," she said. "Johnpaul listened. I had some bossy consultants in the early going, and I think he was waiting for them to go away. And they did. I fired all of them."

Jones identified and located every tree on the property. He cut down only two of them. He repositioned small cabins set in rows along swirling paths. He updated the old stone chapel without disturbing its place against a wall of granite.

"He has an understanding of what people do," said Bullitt. "They talk, they rest, they eat, they need privacy and they need beauty. He has a warm-hearted spiritual feeling about space.

"He is one of a kind."

Blaine Newnham is a Seattle Times sports columnist. Harley Soltes is a staff photographer for Pacific Northwest magazine.