 | Thisbiography of a living personneeds additionalcitations forverification. Please help by addingreliable sources.Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced orpoorly sourcedmust be removed immediately from the article and its talk page, especially if potentiallylibelous. Find sources: "Mark Wilson Jones" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(August 2015) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Mark Roland Wilson Jones (born 1956) is an architect and architectural historian whose research covers varied aspects of classical architecture while concentrating on that of ancient Greece and Rome. He is best known for his work on the design of monumental buildings, especially thePantheon, Rome, and that of the Architectural orders in both Roman and Greek contexts. He is the author of two important books of classical architecture, and is currently a senior lecturer (associate professor) at theUniversity of Bath.
Wilson Jones was educated atQueens' College, Cambridge (MA Cantab in architecture, RIBA Part 1) and the Polytechnic of Central London, now theUniversity of Westminster (Diploma in architecture, RIBA Part 2, with distinction). The architecture department at PCL at the time benefited from inspirational young teachers includingDavid Leatherbarrow,Eric Parry,Demetri Porphyrios andRobert Tavernor. Wilson Jones moved to Rome to take up tenure of the Rome Prize (the British Prix de Rome) in Architecture at theBritish School at Rome (1982–1984), with a project on the masterpiece ofBaldassarre Peruzzi,Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne, and it was the process of understanding Peruzzi’s ideas about ancient design that led Wilson Jones to study ancient Roman practice in its own right. To further this research he was awarded a research contract with the Soprintendenza Archeologica di Roma (1984-5) at the instigation of the archeologistLucos Cozza.
While working as an architect for practices including Shepheard, Epstein and Hunter in London and Bruges Tozer inBristol, Wilson Jones published several articles on his discoveries about thePantheon, Rome,Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne, theTempietto and theCorinthian order. Having won research grants from theBritish Academy and theLeverhulme Trust he moved back to Rome in 1991, where he combined research with private practice and teaching at theUniversity of Rome La Sapienza and at American universities with programmes in Rome, along with fellowships in the United States. In 2000 he moved to the Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering,University of Bath, where he has served as Director of CASA, and Director of Postgraduate Research. His research has received funding from bodies including theAHRC and he held a research fellowship at theCanadian Centre for Architecture in 2007.[1]
Wilson Jones is a registered architect. His professional practice and archaeological interests have sometimes intersected, as in the commission for a shelter at the site ofCosa north of Rome, and, also on the initiative ofElizabeth Fentress, a masterplan for the site ofVolubilis in Morocco for theWorld Monuments Fund (2001-2003). He has been member of the Architecture and Planning Committee of theBath Preservation Trust since 2001, and a Trustee since 2010.[2] He has served on the Faculty of Archaeology, History and Letters of theBritish School at Rome from 2006 to 2011, and in 2010 was elected corresponding member of theAmerican Institute of Archaeology.
He is married to Donatella Caramia professor of neurology at the University of Rome.
While the scholarly environment of much of Wilson Jones’s research is archaeological, it is characterized by an architectural approach. He is drawn to major unresolved issues, especially if much debated ever since the Renaissance, or even antiquity. His discoveries invite paradigm shifts with respect to the scholarly consensus. A case in point is his demonstration that the Romans designed theCorinthian order of columns not according to ratios based on the lower column diameter, as stipulated byVitruvius and his Renaissance followers. This had been argued by Claude Perrault in 1683, but he and subsequent authorities mistakenly held Roman design to be merely empirical. Wilson Jones proved, however, that while yet compatible with almost endless variation the Romans did in fact employ a system of simple arithmetical ratios (e.g. 1:1,1:2 and 6:5) to design and produce Corinthian columns. His synthetic vision of Roman design appeared asPrinciples of Roman Architecture (Yale University Press, 2000), the only book to have been awarded both theBanister Fletcher Prize by the RIBA together with the Authors’ Club of Great Britain and the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion by theSociety of Architectural Historians of Great Britain.[3]
An abiding subject of study and controversy has been thePantheon, Rome, which despite being one of the most famous icons of architectural history is arguably a flawed masterpiece. The theory of a compromised design, first published in 1987 together withPaul Davies andDavid Hemsoll, was further developed in the final pair of chapters in Principles of Roman Architecture. Although widely embraced, the ‘compromise hypothesis’ has been contested byLothar Haselberger, a fellow authority on ancient design. Wilson Jones has published further corroboration in the volume of essays,The Pantheon from Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Two decades of research into the nature of the orders and the Greek temple and the orders have culminated in the bookOrigins of Classical Architecture: temples, orders and gifts to the gods in ancient Greece (Yale University Press, 2014). He currently works with the University of Bath
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Academics | |
| Artists | |
| Other | |
