NEH Award Will Help Researchers Expand Work on Architect Fay Jones

Housing the Human and the Sacred will introduce the renowned architecture of Fay Jones to a broader audience through interactive gaming technology, made possible by a $250,000 award from the National Endowment for the Humanities.  

Professors Greg Herman and David Fredrick received the NEH Digital Projects for the Public Grant based on A House of the Ozarks, their current prototype for a touch-based kiosk and interactive website that allows users to experience Jones’ architecture virtually, in real time and three dimensions.

While A House of the Ozarks provides an interactive, virtual tour of Jones’ Fayetteville home, completed in 1956, Housing the Human and the Sacred will expand the prototype to include five additional structures designed by Jones – four more homes and Thorncrown Chapel, the architect’s most celebrated building. The grant will also enable the researchers to develop an extended, cumulative experience of Jones' architecture via touch-based kiosks, the internet, and virtual reality headsets.

“An Arkansan himself, Fay Jones is one of the most important and most influential American architects,” said Herman, principal investigator for Housing the Human and the Sacred. “As Jones himself put it, more eloquently than I could, architects have ‘the power and responsibility to shape new physical and spatial forms in the landscape, forms that will sustain and nourish and express … the human condition at its spiritual best.’ Fay certainly achieved this, and a big part of what we’re trying to do is ensure more people get to experience what he’s talking about.”

Herman is an associate professor in the Department of Architecture in the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design. For more than a decade, his teaching and research have focused on Jones’ work, and he serves as director of the Fay and Gus Jones House Stewardship, which was responsible for renovating and curating the Jones family home.