Mary Margaret Jones is president and senior principal at Hargreaves Associates and a 1998 Fellow in landscape architecture. A former chair of the AAR Board of Trustees, she is the coauthor of Landscapes & Gardens (2015), which features the firm’s smaller scale work and celebrates the power of landscape and gardens to impact our everyday lives.

“I am using this time at AAR,” she told AAR Magazine, “to recharge my batteries as my firm embarks on a new chapter, which I am thrilled to be leading.” Jones is developing a series of essays on the state of the profession of landscape architecture, “positing arguments using our work as case studies to challenge ourselves and other landscape architects to focus on the core of why we make landscapes, and why they are needed to support and advance our humanity and civic culture. My hope is that these treatises will form the basis for our next book.”

Piazzas in Rome, “often ornamented and animated by fountains,” are part of Jones’s interest in how urban space defines cities and supports public life. “Fountains are a feature of many of our projects, and it is amazing how often we have to fight for them—they are expensive and require maintenance—but they are key.”