John Crone had worked in locations around the world – New
Zealand and London, among them – and wasn’t looking for a teaching job. Yet, he
landed in Fayetteville, got a guest teaching position in the landscape
architecture department at the University of Arkansas and continued to teach
for another 33 years.
The longest-serving landscape architecture faculty member in
the Fay Jones School of Architecture, Crone will retire at the end of this
academic year. A reception will be held in his honor from 12:30 to 2 p.m.
Friday, April 19, at Memorial Hall on the balcony. The school invites the
campus community to join Crone for this event.
Crone received his Bachelor of Landscape Architecture from
the University of Georgia and his Master of Regional Planning from the
University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
After finishing graduate school, he arrived in Winslow to
check out the Depression era farm that had belonged to his grandfather. He just
planned to fix it up as a vacation home. While doing maintenance on it, he was
a visiting assistant professor in the landscape architecture department for a
year.
“It was interesting how life created that opportunity out of
the blue,” he said.
Crone was somewhat familiar with the university and the
area. A family friend worked in the architecture school at the time. His
grandfather was an engineer for the dining hall at Lake Wedington park, and had
worked on other Civilian Conservation Corps and Works Progress Administration
projects in the state, such as Blanchard Springs Caverns.
When Crone arrived to the program in 1980, it was fledgling.
Over the years, he’s taught most of the classes that have been offered, and he
has rubbed elbows with all of the students since the first graduating class.
He’s also served as faculty adviser for the Sigma Lambda Alpha honor society.
“It’s been a privilege to know all the students,” he said.
He’s also taught in the many campus locations that have
housed landscape architecture – including Hill Hall, Vol Walker Hall, Carnall
Hall, and, for several years now, Memorial Hall.
While teaching design and construction courses, he placed an
emphasis on community planning, housing and sustainable design. His research
focused on sustainable community design and the relationship between community
planning and sustainable agriculture.
At the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Crone had
studied under Ian McHarg, who founded that university’s department of landscape
architecture and regional planning and ran it for three decades. McHarg wrote
the 1969 book Design With Nature,
which urged landscape planners to work with ecology rather than against it.
Crone brought that ecological planning methodology to bear
in his instruction, but he later also became interested in New Deal-era farm
communities and sustainability.
Crone likes that he was able to combine teaching with
research, conducting ecological inventories and analyses under various funding
situations. “It’s really nice when you can bring the research and the students
together so they can see that you’re walking the talk,” he said.
Students also saw him practicing landscape architecture when
he hosted get-togethers at his Winslow farm and his home in Fayetteville.
Students could see he was practicing conservation ecology – with a
well-designed, sustainable garden that fed his family.
“I think that where and how you live is really important,”
he said.
Outside of the classroom, one of his proudest
accomplishments was helping to secure the property that would become Garvan
Woodland Gardens, the university’s botanical garden located in Hot Springs. He
feels that event really got the program and department noticed campuswide.
Crone came along when the plan was being developed, and he
worked alongside other faculty members to understand the wishes of benefactress
Verna Cook Garvan, and to assure her that her wishes would be carried out.
Under Crone’s leadership as department head from 1987-93,
the landscape architecture department achieved full national accreditation
status.
In 2011, the Arkansas Chapter of the American Society of
Landscape Architects awarded him the Arkansas Pioneer Award. This award, given
periodically by the state chapter, acknowledges a person who has given a body
of lifetime work to the profession of landscape architecture in the state.
While teaching, Crone participated in community service
activities, serving on the Washington County Planning Board for eight years and
the city of Fayetteville’s Tree and Landscape Committee for the past nine
years. He said that experience helped keep his teaching rooted in the reality
of everyday situations facing residents and governments. His example also
helped lead some alumni to serve in planning positions in their careers.
Crone and his first wife raised their family – sons Chris, Jonathan
and Ben – on the farm in Winslow. Crone and his wife, Camilla, have been
married for 10 years. In his retirement, they plan to do some work and
landscaping on their rental properties in Fayetteville. They also plan to
rehabilitate a 5-acre, Roosevelt-era homestead in Morongo Valley, Calif., which
has a desert ecology completely different from Arkansas. His retirement plans
also include spending more time with his sons and four grandchildren, all of
whom live in the Fayetteville area.