Susan Jones

Susan Jones founded her Seattle-based architectural practice, atelierjones in 2003. A national leader in mass timber design and construction, Jones completed four CLT-based projects in the Pacific Northwest including a single-family house, a church, and two modular CLTSchools. She currently has several other projects in development, one of which is an eight-story, 66,000-square-foot design for a Seattle housing non-profit, set to be one of the first mass timber projects in the U.S built with the new Type IV-C codes that she helped write for the International Code Council.

Jones integrates her passion for the lower-carbon mass timber not only through her all-woman owned firm but in her role as an Affiliate Associate Professor of Architecture in the College of the Built Environments at the University of Washington. She’s currently teaching her students about sustainable forestry practices and what it means to be ethically engaged in changing the architecture and construction industry.

“We as architects have a certain level of cultural and economic capital to exercise these choices,” she said. “We don’t have total control, but we do have influence and we can explain the positive environmental and cultural impacts of sourcing timber locally versus globally, where there are dramatic injustices at play in peoples’ lives throughout the supply chain.”