OUR FIRM

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We at atelierjones use design as an agent of sustainability, working with mass timber and prefabrication to reshape our building culture.

atelierjones’ work is driving new sustainable pathways within architecture, advancing new lower carbon, pre-fabricated mass timber systems by designing and building at multiple scales, from large-scale urban housing to urban infill housing to pre-fabricated mass timber modular homes. Guided by atelierjones’ national leadership in multiple international collaborations, the firm creates sustainable change at scale and insures rigor on multiple levels, from design to forest health to fire testing to life-cycle analyses.

Founded by Susan Jones, FAIA, atelierjones seeks out sites, buildings, and materials with inherent but underutilized value—to harvest their embodied energy, their catalytic power for owners and communities, their beauty. Her work creates delight and wonder in leftover, dirty, forgotten places, spaces, and materials, creating new uses in innovative and beautiful ways. atelierjones has forged this cross-disciplinary approach through embracing methodologies mined from sustainability and materials research, from historic preservation and adaptive reuse movements, real estate development as well as community activism.

A highly nimble architectural woman-owned firm, atelierjones has been devoted to the vision that design can engender large-scale sustainable changes in our carbon-intensive US building industry since inception in 2003. Design-award winning, atelierjones is a national leader in implementing innovative lower carbon construction technologies to help lower the carbon footprint of the industry. atelierjones completed four of the first mass timber demonstration projects permitted in the US: a single-family house, a church, and two modular CLT schools. Current design projects in their Seattle office include one of the first 8-story mass timber workforce housing projects in the US, as well as mass timber prefabricated modular homes under construction in California and in the mountains of the PNW.

A national leader in the mass timber community, Susan represented over 90,000 architects on behalf of the American Institute of Architects in 2016 to successfully change American building codes to allow tall mass timber buildings up to 18 stories in the US. In 2018, she published a book, Mass Timber | Design and Research, which launched in New York City, London, Tokyo, and Seattle. In addition to multiple mass timber design projects, the firm worked with The Nature Conservancy, the USDA, and the Research Institute of Sweden (RISE) on a series of grants to test life-cycle analyses and fire resistance of Mass Timber in the US and internationally.

The firm’s work has been recognized by numerous national, regional and local design awards and been published nationally and internationally. Licensed in multiple states, Susan has taught at the University of Washington since 1991, been a visiting design critic at numerous national universities, and is an Affiliate Associate Professor of Architecture in the College of the Built Environments, University of Washington. A third-generation Pacific Northwesterner, she was elected to the AIA College of Fellows in 2010 and has been working for architects since she was sixteen.