Architect

A. Quincy Jones

1913–1979

Profile

About A. Quincy Jones.

Archibald Quincy Jones, FAIA (1913 to 1979), was a Los Angeles-based architect whose roughly 5,000 built projects helped define California mid-century modernism. His San Gabriel Valley residential catalog is narrow and is anchored by the Hixon Estate at 1100 Paso Alto Road in Pasadena's Linda Vista hills, commissioned in 1976. Jones served as Dean of the USC School of Architecture and Fine Arts from 1975 to 1978, and his partnership with Frederick Emmons from 1951 to 1969 produced approximately 5,000 Eichler tract houses primarily in the San Fernando Valley and Bay Area.

Archibald Quincy Jones FAIA (1913–1979, Wikidata Q4648275), known professionally as A. Quincy Jones, was a Los Angeles–based architect and educator whose roughly 5,000 built projects helped define California mid-century modernism. His San Gabriel Valley residential catalog is narrow, anchored by the Hixon Estate at 1100 Paso Alto Road in Pasadena’s Linda Vista hills, commissioned in 1976 by Iowa lumber heiress Adelaide Hixon and her diplomat husband Alexander Hixon as a 6,500-square-foot entertaining house alongside their existing 1954 Thornton Ladd residence on the same 3.3-acre estate.

Buyers searching for a Jones house in the San Gabriel Valley search a small market. Most of Jones’s residential commissions are concentrated in West Los Angeles, particularly Brentwood, Bel Air, Pacific Palisades, and the Mutual Housing Association at Crestwood Hills, which Jones developed with Whitney R. Smith, structural engineer Edgardo Contini, and landscape architect Garrett Eckbo. The development’s Site Office (LAHCM No. 680, designated 2000) was the first building completed and is a documented Jones-Smith collaboration. The 5,000 Eichler tract houses produced through Jones’s partnership with Frederick Emmons (1951–1969) were built largely in the Bay Area and the San Fernando Valley, not the SGV. The Pasadena Hixon Estate stands as Jones’s signal late-period SGV commission and one of Pasadena’s most significant late-modern residences.

A Jones house is identifiable by post-and-beam construction with extensive glazing, asymmetrical rooflines, deliberate integration with the surrounding landscape including courtyards and indoor-outdoor transitions, and a humanist proportional system that Jones described as “design for better living.” Late-period commissions, including the Hixon Estate, introduce custom steel framing, soaring double-height living volumes, indoor-outdoor water features, and Luis Barragán–influenced courtyard and waterfall elements. Materials tend toward exposed wood structure, expansive glass walls, and built-in cabinetwork that integrates rather than punctuates the architecture.

Jones served as professor and dean at the University of Southern California School of Architecture and Fine Arts, holding the deanship from 1975 through 1978. His teaching tenure spanned 1950 to 1978 as fifth-year design critic and faculty member. The 1969 American Institute of Architects Firm Award to Jones and Emmons (PCAD person/303) recognized one of the highest peer-conferred honors in American architecture. Jones earned more than seventy individual citations for design excellence during his career and was elected Fellow of the American Institute of Architects (FAIA).

For SGV buyers, A. Quincy Jones is the reference architect against whom any late mid-century modern property in Pasadena or the broader San Gabriel Valley can be measured. The 2013 Hammer Museum retrospective “A. Quincy Jones: Building for Better Living,” part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A., was the first major institutional retrospective of his work and substantially elevated his profile within mid-century-modern architectural scholarship. Provenance attribution for a candidate Jones house should be confirmed through the A. Quincy Jones Papers at UCLA Library Special Collections or through the USC architectural archive before purchase.

Career and partnerships

Jones graduated from the University of Washington in 1936, partnered with Paul R. Williams on Palm Springs commissions in the late 1940s, then formed his lasting partnership with Frederick Emmons in 1951. The Jones and Emmons firm received the 1969 AIA Architectural Firm Award and produced roughly 5,000 Eichler tract houses through 1969.

Jones was born in Kansas City, Missouri, on April 29, 1913, and was raised in the Los Angeles–area city of Gardena before finishing high school in Seattle. He earned his Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Washington in 1936, where his teacher Lionel Pries shaped his orientation toward integrated humanist design. After early work in the offices of Douglas Honnold, George Vernon Russell, and Burton Schutt, and a wartime position with Allied Engineers in San Pedro where he met Frederick Emmons, Jones opened his own Los Angeles practice in the mid-1940s.

The Paul R. Williams partnership produced the Palm Springs Tennis Club (1947), the Town and Country Center (1948, Palm Springs Class 1 Historic Site designated 2016), and Romanoff’s On the Rocks (1950). The Jones and Emmons partnership extended Jones’s residential work into volume production for developer Joseph Eichler, refining post-and-beam construction and atrium planning into a buildable system for middle-class buyers. By the 1960s the practice had expanded into university and corporate work, including UCLA’s University Research Library (1971), USC’s Faculty Center (1960) and Annenberg School of Communications (1976 and 1979), and the IBM Aerospace Headquarters in Westchester (1963).

The Hixon Estate at 1100 Paso Alto Road

The Hixon Estate, designed for Adelaide and Alexander Hixon in the mid-1970s, is a 6,500-square-foot steel-and-glass entertaining house atop Pasadena’s Linda Vista hills. It features soaring angular double-height ceilings, glass walls, an indoor-outdoor koi pond, a Luis Barragán–influenced cascading waterfall, and views toward the Rose Bowl and San Gabriel Mountains.

The Hixon Estate occupied a particular role in the Hixons’ philanthropy: it was built specifically as an event and fundraising house, with the family’s primary residence remaining the 1954 Thornton Ladd house elsewhere on the 3.3-acre Paso Alto property. Jones’s design accommodated catered events for hundreds of guests while preserving a three-bedroom, five-bathroom residential program at its core.

The exterior’s faceted geometry, sometimes described as resembling a grand piano in form, organizes around open-air courtyards, atriums, and Zen-style gardens. The Barragán-influenced waterfall and indoor-outdoor koi pond create the seamless interior-exterior transitions that define Jones’s late residential work. The double-height living volume centers on a fireplace, with the dining room’s floor-to-ceiling windows framing the Rose Bowl view and the San Gabriel Mountain range beyond. Interior finishes include original terrazzo floors and custom floor-to-ceiling built-ins that survive substantially intact.

The property has appeared on the market multiple times in the past two decades, most recently as a dual-residence offering with the Ladd house at $11.5 million in 2022 and as the Jones residence alone at $6.8 million in 2023. The combination of late-period Jones provenance, original interior preservation, and Pasadena Linda Vista location places it among the most architecturally significant late-modern residences in the San Gabriel Valley.

How to identify a Jones house

Jones signatures include post-and-beam structure with deep glazing, asymmetrical and often angular rooflines, courtyard or atrium planning that integrates interior and exterior space, humanist proportions, and a deliberate landscape integration that Jones articulated as “design for better living.” Late-period commissions introduce custom steel framing and double-height living volumes.

The post-and-beam structural clarity is the most reliable Jones signature, distinguishing his work from the broader mid-century modern vocabulary in which California postwar residential architecture participates. Roof geometries range from the low-pitched horizontal forms of his Crestwood Hills and Eichler work to the soaring angular volumes of his late entertaining commissions. The Hixon Estate represents the extreme of the late-career formal language; smaller Jones residences, particularly the Brentwood and Bel Air commissions and the Eichler tract houses, exhibit more restrained horizontality.

Atrium and courtyard planning recurs across the catalog, from the Eichler tract houses through the custom residential work into the institutional commissions. Indoor-outdoor circulation, sliding glass walls, and direct landscape integration are consistent throughout. Materials in the custom residential work emphasize exposed wood structure, expansive glazing, and integrated built-in cabinetry. Eichler tract houses substitute production-grade materials within the same spatial logic, which is why Eichler attribution requires Bay Area or San Fernando Valley location rather than SGV provenance.

Where Jones houses appear in the San Gabriel Valley

The SGV Jones catalog is narrow and is anchored by the Pasadena Hixon Estate at 1100 Paso Alto Road. The bulk of Jones’s residential commissions are concentrated in West Los Angeles, particularly Brentwood, Bel Air, Pacific Palisades, and the Crestwood Hills Mutual Housing Association. Eichler tracts are in the Bay Area and San Fernando Valley.

Buyers attributing a candidate Pasadena or San Gabriel Valley mid-century property to A. Quincy Jones face a verification step of particular importance: the geographic distribution of his catalog makes SGV attribution rare. The A. Quincy Jones Papers held at UCLA Library Special Collections include project files, drawings, and correspondence that support attribution research for specific addresses. The USC architectural archive holds additional teaching and project material.

Late-period Jones residential work in Southern California outside West Los Angeles is documented at scattered Palm Springs and Pasadena addresses, with the Hixon Estate as the most architecturally significant SGV example. Buyers identifying a candidate Jones property in the SGV should commission provenance research before purchase rather than rely on general agent attribution or anecdotal local history.

Why Jones’s mid-century modern legacy still anchors SGV evaluation

The 2013 Hammer Museum retrospective re-established A. Quincy Jones as a foundational figure in California mid-century modernism. For SGV buyers evaluating mid-century properties, his hallmarks, including post-and-beam clarity, glazing-to-frame ratio, landscape integration, and atrium planning, serve as the reference benchmark against which any candidate mid-century house can be measured.

The Hammer Museum retrospective, which ran spring through September 2013 as part of the Getty Pacific Standard Time Presents initiative, was the first major institutional treatment of Jones’s career and substantially elevated his profile within architectural scholarship. The exhibition included original drawings, photographs, and models drawn from the UCLA Special Collections archive and treated his residential, institutional, and unbuilt work as a coherent body.

For prospective buyers of mid-century modern property in the San Gabriel Valley, Jones’s principles offer a calibration framework even where his name does not appear on the deed. Post-and-beam structure, generous glazing, courtyard or atrium planning, and explicit landscape integration are the design moves that distinguish architect-designed mid-century modern from speculative postwar tract construction. Where these moves are present at scale and intentionality, the property merits architectural-grade evaluation regardless of attribution; where they are absent, the property is more likely a speculative postwar house wearing mid-century visual cues.

Jones’s career intersects directly with the Smith and Williams entity through his early Crestwood Hills collaboration with Whitney R. Smith. Broader stylistic context appears in the Mid-Century Modern style entity. Mills Act eligibility framing for designated mid-century properties appears in the Mills Act SGV cluster.

Styles

Associated Styles.

Works

Notable Works in the SGV.

Sources

Sources and references.

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This guide is informational and is not legal, tax, or financial advice. Mills Act eligibility, ADU permitting, and property tax implications vary by property and by year. Consult the relevant city, the Los Angeles County Assessor, and a licensed tax professional for guidance specific to your situation.