Mary Margaret Jones is senior principal of Hargreaves Associates and Hargreaves Jones. She is known for her leadership of the firm’s many awardwinning projects around the globe. In her role she oversees the firm’s three offices – in San Francisco, Calif., Cambridge, Mass., and New York City – and serves on juries, lectures widely and is active in the public forum of design
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Q&A
and development issues. From the earliest discussions of a reimagined downtown, Jones has been a part of the Scissortail Park evolution. The Park is one of the firm’s biggest projects underway at this time. The Grand Opening of the Upper Park signals 11 years of her career spent working in Oklahoma City with many of the Park stakeholders. During a recent visit to check on the progress of the Park, Jones paused to discuss her career and observations of the city. Q: What inspired you to become a landscape architect? A: Growing up in Southeast Texas, I have always had a connection to the landscape. Summertime meant we were out the door in the morning, running around barefoot, making forts, with barely taking time to come home for lunch. While I have always had an interest in architecture I didn’t know if I wanted to spend so much time on a building. When I got to college, I was looking through the course catalogue at Texas A&M University, where I went to school, and thought landscape architecture could be the right thing for me.
Q: How is Scissortail Park different than Myriad Botanical Gardens? A: The Gardens has an intimacy because it is small, and it is mature. While there
are sections of the Park that will be intimate, at 70 acres it is awesome in scale. The perspective is different because it is a large park. With this kind of scale we are able to create the bones of something that will grow and evolve through the years as people adapt and change the way they use parks.