John Kneeland Mott
Architect John Mott is a pioneer (and mentor) in promoting historic preservation. His design and preservation team work involves 200 restoration and adaptive use projects across the nation.
When John Mott was a young architecture student at the University of Arkansas in the late 1950s and early ’60s, many of his classes were at Old Main, the university’s first building constructed in 1871.
Little did he know then that he would one day use the skills he was learning to restore that iconic structure and that it would be the crowning achievement of a career that has spanned more than 50 years.
Last month, he was honored for that project, as well as the rest of his award-winning body of work, when he returned to his native Arkansas from his home in Potomac, Md., to accept the 2022 Parker Westbrook Award for Lifetime Achievement. Presented by Preserve Arkansas, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting historic preservation within the state, the award is named in honor of Parker Westbrook, the group’s founding president.
“Through his knowledge, skill, leadership, integrity, discipline, mentorship, achievements, education, wit, and utmost humility, John Mott is a pillar in the preservation community,” Ethel Goodstein-Murphree, professor of architecture and associate dean of the University of Arkansas Fay Jones School of Architecture + Design, said at the awards banquet.
Not only is he a pillar in the preservation community, but he is also a true pioneer for historic preservation in Arkansas. When he began his career in the late 1960s, there were few preservation projects in the state. With his efforts and those of others, including Westbrook, that would change, much to the benefit of Arkansas’ historic sites and to the state as a whole.
LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON
Mott, 85, was born in Fort Smith at the end of the Great Depression and on the eve of America’s involvement in World War II. As were many towns and cities across the nation at the time, the western Arkansas city was a busy railroad hub, which stoked his fascination with trains. He and his younger brother had the good fortune to have a grandfather who was a district freight superintendent for Missouri Pacific Railroad in Poplar Bluff, Mo. Mott’s family would often visit his grandparents there.
“I can remember being taken down to the railroad yard in the morning,” Mott says. “He [grandfather] would let me climb up into the switch engine, and he’d tell the engineer to take care of me, and he would pick me up at lunch time.”
In addition to the railroads, he also recalls seeing soldiers from nearby Fort Chaffee walking around downtown Fort Smith as they prepared for their roles in WWII and the excitement that the rodeo brought to the community.
“I wouldn’t trade anything for growing up in Fort Smith,” he says.
His father, Ralph, was an architect and owned his own firm in Fort Smith, which still operates today. He would follow in his father’s footsteps when he
decided to study architecture, although he says he didn’t have “a burning desire to be an architect, necessarily.”
“I guess I didn’t really know what I wanted to do,” he says. “My parents, my friends, just all assumed I would be an architect, and I liked drafting. I worked at my dad’s office during the summers when I was in high school. So, I went to architecture school and somewhere in the process, I guess I really decided that that’s what I wanted to do.”
After graduating from the University of Arkansas in 1960, where he took several classes from the renowned architect E. Fay Jones, he returned to Fort Smith and worked at his father’s firm for about a year and a half. During that time, a major project for the firm was the construction of Humphreys Hall, a residence hall on the UA campus.
“I was the on-site representative, kind of like the inspector of what was going on,” Mott says. “It was a real education.”
Expecting that he would eventually be drafted into military service, Mott applied for admittance to the U.S. Navy Officer Candidate School at Newport, R.I. “I really enjoyed it, and I was giving real serious thought to staying in the Navy,” he says. But architecture won out in the end, and, in 1968, he came home to rejoin his father’s firm.
Upon his return, he became involved in the restoration of the Clayton House in Fort Smith. The Victorian mansion, built in 1882, had been condemned. The new owner, a local historic preservation group, approached the firm about restoring it, marking Mott’s first foray into preservation. As time went on, the firm took on even more preservation projects with Mott’s direction.
SAVING OLD MAIN
In 1971, as the University of Arkansas celebrated its centennial, it became clear that its signature building, Old Main, needed a major restoration inside and out. Because of its age, along with fires and termites, Old Main was in bad shape. It got so bad at one point, Mott says, that brick from the edge of the roof was falling off.
As part of the centennial, the university’s board of trustees hired Mott and his firm, Mott, Mobley, Horstman and Griffin, for the project. Over the next 20 years, the building was restored in phases as funding became available. It was completed in 1991 at the cost of more than $10.1 million.
For Mott, the Old Main project was like no other.
“I think is was special, partly because I’d had had a lot of classes in Old Main,” Mott says. “And it was an important building.”
One of the most interesting parts of the project was restoring the auditorium, which had been subdivided into offices and had become unrecognizable. “We knew from photographs that the auditorium had at one time been in there, but there didn’t seem to be anything left,” Mott says, adding that after workers removed a partition, they found a stenciling pattern that had been on the auditorium wall. At first, it wasn’t certain that the auditorium would be restored, but Mott said money was later donated specifically for that work by a university alumna.
“The auditorium that is there today is a pretty accurate reconstruction of what that auditorium was,” Mott says. Even the lighting fixtures are period-correct, thanks to a lighting designer on the Old Main project who recognized that they were similar to fixtures that had been reproduced for the restoration at Ellis Island in New York. “Because this company was making some, we were able to get them for Old Main without having to pay an arm and a leg to redesign and remanufacture the light fixtures,” Mott adds.
THE PRESERVATION BUG
Any doubts he may have had about his career choice were gone after his work on Old Main.
“That really got me hooked on preservation,” he says.
It also caught the attention of other preservation leaders in the state, most notably Parker Westbrook, the founding president of the Historic Preservation Alliance of Arkansas, now known as Preserve Arkansas. Mott served on the group’s board of directors from 198086, including a stint as president from 1984-86. While on the board, he was most impressed with Westbrook, who died in 2015 at the age of 89.
“He was a force on the board of directors,” Mott says. “He had a knack for figuring out what needed to be done, who were the best people to accomplish it and then he managed to talk them into agreeing to do it.”
While he was active at home, he also was making contacts nationally through the American Institute of Architects where he served as a national board member from 1988-1990. While on the AIA national board, Mott became chairman of the building committee for the restoration of a historic building that the AIA had bought to serve as its headquarters. In this role, he met many other preservation architects, including George Notter, owner of a nationally known preservation architecture firm based in Boston. That acquaintance led to Notter asking Mott to manage the firm’s office in Washington, which Mott agreed to do in 1993. After an illness required Notter to close his firm, Mott joined John Milner Associates, now MTFA Architecture, and moved to the firm’s Alexandria, Va., office. He currently serves as MTFA’s director of preservation.
In addition to local projects in the D.C. area, Mott maintained his relationships in Arkansas and continued to work on projects such as the Drennan-Scott House and Willhaf House, both in Van Buren and owned by the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith. Mott also worked on the restoration of Vol Walker Hall at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.
HISTORY DETECTIVES
Mott especially enjoys doing research to prepare for building restorations. In the first phase of a project, a historic structures report, known as an HSR, is done.
“It is generally a study of the house, the house’s history, who built it, and oftentimes a study of the family or families who lived there,” he says, adding that the report also includes such things as the original paint colors used in a building.
During the HSR phase and beyond, architects look for clues, much like a detective.
“What happens often with historic houses and historic buildings is that you find a clue here, and what you find was not necessarily even anything you were looking for,” Mott says.
Among the most notable HSR projects Mott has done was for the Washington Monument, which was completed in 1884.
“The [National] Park Service had never had historic structures report done for the Washington Monument, so we did one,” Mott says, adding that other firms did the official preservation work on the monument during its restoration and after it was damaged by an earthquake in 2011.
The National Cathedral in Washington, was also damaged in the earthquake, and Mott’s firm has done and continues to do work on it. In addition, Mott has completed preservation projects for the Cannon House Office Building, the oldest congressional office building outside of the Capitol building, and the Library of Congress. Currently, he and his firm are working on the renovation of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington.
In all, Mott has led MTFA’s design and preservation team on more than 200 restoration and adaptive use projects across the nation.
PRESERVATION IS GREEN
Throughout his 50-year career, Mott has seen many changes in the field of historic preservation. As more has been learned about preservation work and interest in preserving historic sites has grown, Mott says firms now employ architectural historians, conservators and more in addition to architects. “In the 1940s or so, the handful of architects who did preservation work, they did everything,” Mott says.
There is also a growing realization that preservation conserves natural resources, making it good for the environment, Mott says.
“We always say that preservation is as green as you can get,” he says. “We’ve got to stop tearing down old buildings to build new ones and start reusing those old buildings. Because the amount of energy that was used to build the existing building has already been spent. When you tear one down and build a new one, then you have the energy it takes to tear it down, you have the energy to create the new materials and you have the energy it takes to build, whereas if you would reuse the old building, recognizing that you need to make some changes and so on, it’s a way to save all that energy.”
Mott’s work has garnered more than 40 local, state, regional and national design awards in addition to the Parker Westbrook Award for Lifetime Achievement. Rachel Patton, executive director of Preserve Arkansas, says Mott was most deserving of the award.
“John Mott was an easy choice for the Parker Westbrook Award — in fact — it is long overdue when you consider the impressive volume of work he has completed over the past 50-plus years, as well as his devotion to Preserve Arkansas and other preservation nonprofits,” Patton says. “John steered the Historic Preservation Alliance of Arkansas [now Preserve Arkansas] as board president during a critical time in the organization’s history, when the Alliance was partnering to create the Main Street Arkansas program and Arkansas Natural and Cultural Resources Council in the early-to-mid-1980s.”
Patton noted that despite living in Washington for the past 40 years, Mott has maintained close ties to Arkansas and shares his knowledge with younger professionals in preservation.
“John is humble, kind and willing to share stories and knowledge with younger generations of preservationists, making him a mentor to many in the field of preservation architecture and design,” Patton says.
While Mott graciously accepted the Preserve Arkansas award for his past work, he hasn’t stopped looking ahead.
Although he works fewer hours now than in the past, he has learned, thanks in part to the pandemic, that he can work from home more and save time with fewer commutes to the office.
“Just before the pandemic, I had been thinking about slowing down, like maybe working half time or something,” he says.
But when he and the firm’s staff began working from home, he realized it was easier to keep working without the commute to an office every day.
“Since I could work at home, I thought, what else am I going to do? It was actually kind of nice to be able to have something to do instead of just sitting around the house,” he says.
And although he loves to travel with his wife, Carol, he has no plans to retire completely.
“I still run some projects, but I’m kind of an overall mentor to the younger group of preservation architects,” he says, adding that he provides oversight and input to the project managers.
“I get to be involved, helping out or giving advice or reviewing or whatever,” he says. “It is actually fun because it means I get to get my fingers into watching lots of jobs.”
“John Mott was an easy choice for the Parker Westbrook Award — in fact — it is long overdue when you consider the impressive volume of work he has completed over the past 50-plus years, as well as his devotion to Preserve Arkansas and other preservation nonprofits.”
— Rachel Patton, executive director of Preserve Arkansas