Maurice Jennings

SELF

PORTRAIT Date and place of birth:

Nov.

6, 1947, Heber Springs

Family:

Wife, Sissy, son Walter, and daughter Marci Jennings-Crosby

Favorite passage in the Bible:

Hard to beat the Lord’s Prayer

What’s always in my refrigerator:

Skim milk

A smell that will make me nostalgic

is smoke from a fireplace.

My favorite architectural detail:

I don’t really think that I have one. I think that a detail is really judged by the context within which it is used.

What makes churches special

is that spirituality of the space. It’s one of the reasons the structures are so vertical;

spirituality of the space is achieved upwards rather than downwards.

The best place on the planet is:

Yellowstone in winter. Two years ago I took the whole office to Yellowstone.

My wife is at her best when

we have our friends over for an evening of music and food.

My wife’s best dish:

her fried okra.

The household chore I’m most fastidious about:

I must say I’m not real fastidious with any household chore.

A phrase to sum me up is:

Stay on task.

FAYETTEVILLE - Imagine if you were chief assistant to the man who first rubbed sticks together to make fire, and now he’s dead, and most of the known world is still hoping for lightning strikes.

Maurice Jennings is the chief assistant. The man who put wood together in a new way is the famed architect Fay Jones. He’s dead, and Jennings is the torchbearer, spreading the gospel of wood.

Very likely you’ve heard of E. Fay Jones. His Thorncrown Chapel in Eureka Springs is the most popular work of architecture in the region. Just as likely you’ve never heard of Jennings. He upholstered the pews inside the chapel by hand when the client ran out of money.

Jennings, then and now, is a University of Arkansas-trained architect whose earliest ideas of space and place were passed to him by his homebuilding father. But then he was project manager ofthe Thorncrown affair under Jones, and today, he juggles million-dollar projects, such as the recently dedicated Chapel at Rio Roca on the Brazos River in Palo Pinto, Texas.

He does it all out of an unmarked office.

He does it without ever bidding or soliciting.

“And I completely agree with that,” says Nancy Richards, who sought out Jennings for the Chapel at Rio Roca. “Maurice has a very good sense of not only who his clients are but who they will be ... that they’re looking for that discrimination.”

With its vaulted peak, exaggerated eaves and criss-crossing roof supports, the chapel is a descendant of Thorncrown, but Jennings let himself be inspired by the west Texas terrain. He employed compression cables in place of rafter braces because they reference the oil derricks. The 30-foot water sculpture pays homage to the history of the Comanches in the representation of an arrow, and the tall limestone wall is built of stone excavated from the area.

Because of his “humbleness,” his “vision,” his ability to manage disagreement with “a very calming, supportive, customer-service rapport,” Richards gave him the nickname “national treasure.”

Of course, to be regarded as such by the American Institute of Architects is to receive its gold medal, a lifetime distinction open to architects worldwide and one not issued yearly but only when someone is deemed worthy. To win this an architect must present a singular vision. Jones earned the honor in 1990.

“A lot of what Maurice learned and believes in and continues to believe in are highly influenced byFay. That’s not to say that he doesn’t have his own voice, because ... you can certainly tell the difference between his work and Fay’s,” says Dan Bennett, dean of Auburn University’s architecture college and past dean of the University of Arkansas’ architecture school.

Don Edmondson of Forrest City, whose friendship with Jones and $10 million gift to the school last year was responsible for it being renamed as the Fay Jones School of Architecture, says Jennings does not “try to reinvent the wheel on every project,” and that fidelity should be lauded.

“He carries the philosophy out.”

A NEW KIND OF HOUSE

Unlike the master, Jennings’ first building experience was at ground level. Where Jones’ seminal experience was building a tree house, Jennings’ was digging septic fields.

Walter Jennings was the kind of Heber Springs homebuilder who poured his own foundations and fabricated his own cabinets. He was not an architect but built entirely from his own rough sketches. He was a true artisan builder, and at 12, his son simply couldn’t contribute much. So he dug trenches.

“Probably took me six weeks [to dig a field]. Finally, I went to my dad, said, ‘Dad, surely you can put me doing something else.’ He said, ‘Well, I’d like to, son, but this is all you know.’”

As a high school junior, having not been exposed to much design work outside his father’s craftsmanship, he made a trip to Eden Isle to see a new kind of house being built by Jim Liddle. Its dimensions - walls 24 feet high spread just 12 feet apart but still built using two-byfours - were incongruous. As Life magazine pointed out in June 1966, it was on one level an airy tree house, and on another a cool cave.

This was the Shaheen-Goodfellow house (also called “Stoneflower”), and it was novel. For Jennings, it was architecture manifest.

The next summer, before attending the University of Arkansas, he met the architect at his office, and Jones was very keen to share his thoughts, “teacher that he is,” but for the first two years at the university, Jennings didn’t take a Fay Jones class.

Then he took a long detour.

Halfway through college, Walter Jennings fell three stories down a fireplace shaft and broke his hip, and his son took on the responsibilities of finishing projects still under contract. He did, and then he left to see some of the world.

In Memphis he made $3.20an hour at an architecture firm and about $15 an hour banjo picking at Shakey’s Pizza. It was at the latter gig that he started building something important, because it was at Shakey’s that he met Sissy Waits. She thought music could be his livelihood, but at 6 feet 4 inches and with a deliberate manner, Jennings sort of thought he’d make a good lawman, which may be why after just one date Waits asked him to accompany her and a girlfriend to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. He looked like protection.

She was wrong about Jennings’ music career, and despite later serving as a military policeman in the Arkansas National Guard for several years, he decided that he wasn’t cut out for law enforcement, either. But the two were cut out for each other, and they married a year later.After another stint in Heber Springs as a land surveyor, Jennings finally made it back to school. He was 23, and that year he took a design course with Jones.

When he graduated, Jones hired him. He planned to move on eventually and broaden his experience, but before long he became the first associate Jones ever had, and later, the only partner he ever took.

Far from heading too long in one direction, Jennings says sticking with Jones was the turning point of his life.

HALLMARKS OF HIS STYLE

“When we opened the house up, we had a party in Fay’s and Maurice’s honor,” Edmondson recalls.

The Edmondson home on Crowley’s Ridge in Forrest City is Jones’ grandest residential project, and when they made their whopping gift to the architecture school, they designated $500,000 to endow a scholarship in Jennings’ name.

“So we had this elaborate blowout, and Maurice and Sissy actually stayed in the house with us, and I remember Maurice saying to me, ‘Don, I sure hope we can all remain friends forever.’ I remember that like it was yesterday,” Edmondson says.

Today, when the Edmondsons drive friends up to Fayetteville to take in a football game from their skybox, Jennings offers to entertain them at his home.

For all of his success, and for the sheer size of him, people smile at the tiny bungalow he designed for his family. It is a study in thrift of space. The cabinets and shelves are shallow and abundant. The kitchen counter is butcher block, and low stools, not high-backed chairs, circle the table. A wide stone chimney fireplace separates living room and bedroom, and that’s it - no doors.

“You know, a building, it must have structural integrity. It must provide the inhabitants some form of comfort and shelter, but these things don’t really make up architecture. [The building] has to transcend these elements and become spiritual and a very special place of the heart.”

Throughout, the exposed fieldstone, copper sconces and ridgeline skylight are all hallmarks of Jennings’ style. The living space continues out onto an expansive stone balcony that looks out from Robinson Mountain over a slice of the family’s 270 acres.

“There is a superior being, if you will, and I feel that the best manifestation of that is seen in nature.”

In all his years - side by side with Jones, later with partner David McKee, now with son Walter - Jennings has never strayed from residences, chapels and other communal spaces (pavilions, for instance). He has avoided institutions such as banks andoffices.

NOT SHY ABOUT SINGING

Jennings has a sort of occidental disposition, a frontier elan. It explains, perhaps, his enthusiasm for the Chapel at Rio Roca.

As a younger man he would pick up hitchhikers whenever he saw them until one pulled a knife on him. “I can’t stop to fight you,” he told the man, as if life is just too short.

Edmondson recalls that Jennings “almost killed littleWalter several times.”

“Oh, he’d put him on a sled and tie him up to one of the horses and slap it, and off it’d run with him.”

Bennett remembers a trip down to Forrest City to visit the Edmondsons. Jennings had just bought a Lincoln with voice-activated cellular calling service, and at some point he asked it to call home. “‘Call home,’ ‘Call home,’ and finally, ‘Dammit, I said call home!’” It did then, and later Jennings confessed he programmed the command in exactly that way for a laugh.

He’s also not shy about singing. The couple keep a baby grand piano in the living room, and of course, he plays guitar.

“He was always throwing parties. Because he’s an entertaining guy. He enjoys people, and not just on Thanksgiving or a birthday. He would make up stuff. ‘The peacocks are strutting.’ I don’t know,” Bennett says. “He just loves to entertain ... [and] they’re the kind of family that sings around the piano.”

Perhaps for this reason, Bennett says the chief difference between Jennings and Jones isn’t design but purpose. Jones, he says, wished to be recognized for blazing a way. Jennings busies himself shepherding people along, and making friends.

Today, Jennings goes to work in the same office Jones did, above Underwood’s Fine Jewelers on Dickson Street,and sits at his mentor’s desk. When he stands to greet a visitor, his head nearly brushes against the artificially low stucco ceiling.

Lining the walls are awards from the American Wood Council - for spreading the gospel, no doubt - and the Arkansas chapter of the American Institute of Architects. These were commendations Fay wasn’t interested in, Bennett says.

“Maurice ... reaches out locally more than Fay did.”

Of course, Jennings has also traveled as far as Whittier, Calif., for work (it’s where the majestic Skyrose Chapel stands). His work has earned him a regrettable distinction - he’s one of American Airlines’ “million milers.”

He hates flying.

“Our clients become our best friends. They really do, and that’s what’s really wonderful about the practice of architecture - it’s our clients we end up going on vacation with.”

Jennings says he was surprised and sad when Fay Jones retired 13 years ago. But Jennings’ body of work since Jones’ retirement and his death six years ago has continued the rich legacy of the master and his firm.

“I must say that I’m very content and I’m very pleased with things that I have done. I don’t think, ‘Oh, I’ve got to do this before I’m done.’ I think I need to do more residences and chapels !”