Donor Profile: Mark Matchynski
In San Diego, one newly raised Mason became a Foundation donor in less than a year.
Masonic Assistance
The Modernist and the masons
As the Masonic Home at Covina evolves, renowned midcentury architect A. Quincy Jones’s vision guides a campus built for community and care.
By Stephanie Hunt
When the Citrus Heights Health Center in Covina opened at the Masonic Homes in Covina in 2024, it represented more than the provision of new skilled nursing care for residents. The Center’s design, with its gleaming wood and porous, light-filled spaces, embodied an architecture of care and compassion—rooted in wood paneling and stone masonry, whispered in communal courtyards, and echoed in soaring atriums.
These architectural elements, which earned the Center the 2024 International Interior Design Association Healthcare Design Award, reach back to the campus’s midcentury origins and the enduring legacy of famed California modernist architect A. Quincy Jones. From 1968 to 1970, Jones and his business partner, Frederick J. Emmons, designed a significant portion of Covina’s present-day campus, embedding a language of openness, horizontality, and human scale. The project reimagined what had been the dormitory-like Masonic Home for Children, built in 1916 on a 33-acre former citrus ranch east of Los Angeles—reshaping not just the campus, but the philosophy behind it.
“Jones was a very dignified man, a true networker and collaborator. He believed in giving back, which he did with students as dean and teacher at the University of Southern California. And while he was not a Mason, the philosophy would have attracted him,” says Cory Buckner, an LA–based architect and author of the 2002 monograph A. Quincy Jones, who has lived in one Jones-designed home and restored several others. “Obviously, the Masonic Homes had a very progressive view in hiring him.”
Historical records show that in October 1968, the Masonic Homes board approved the contract for Jones and Emmons’s master plan of the Covina redevelopment, including “demolition of the sixty-year-old dormitories, construction of the new perimeter roadway, and moving of the baseball and tennis facilities.” Jones’s plan replaced the traditional orphanage with family-style cottages grouped around a central community building, all connected by landscaped open spaces. At the time, 30 elementary, 18 junior high, and 18 high school students lived at the Masonic Home, with three couples serving as house parents. His goal was to make the campus feel less institutional, more “family centered,” as the records indicate. That also meant swapping agrarian structures for recreational opportunities—feeding pens were converted to basketball, volleyball, and badminton courts, and the barn became a recreational-vocational site—presumably to the delight of the kids.
Jones believed in “building for better living,” as the title of a 2013 retrospective of his work at University of California, Los Angeles’s Hammer Museum suggests. At Covina, he accomplished this in two ways. First with buildings: using simple, durable materials like wood, steel, and concrete, with efficient, open floor plans and abundant light. And then with landscape: blurring indoor and outdoor space. Covina shows how Jones’s interest in innovation and his belief in design as a tool for community align with Masonic values of dignity and care.
“He had a proclivity for understanding communal spaces. He was one of the first to introduce the idea of having a public space and a private space in your living area, whether that’s a single-family home or in a group setting like Covina,” says Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, the Helen Hilton Raiser curator of architecture and design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and curator of the Hammer Museum retrospective. (Like Buckner, Fletcher also once lived in a Jones-designed home in LA.)
Jones and Emmons, best known for their postwar collaborations with California developer Joseph Eichler, tackled the Covina project at the height of their partnership. In 1969, their LA–based company received the American Institute of Architects Architectural Firm Award. Jones’s portfolio primarily included civic and university buildings and churches, and to Fletcher’s knowledge he hadn’t designed any campuses. Still, the Covina project played to his strengths. “It reflects intentional building for community living and thriving,” she says.
“The entrance to the community building is so typical of his work, with eight-by-eight masonry block grounding the site, juxtaposed with this light and airy post-and-beam structure—those elements of solidity and transparency that he played with,” explains Buckner. She notes Covina’s abundant greenery, and how Jones used landscaping to dissolve boundary lines between buildings. The overall feel is more welcoming and homey than institutional. “Jones didn’t work in a single style,” Buckner adds. “He was always growing and changing in order to meet the users’ needs.” Judging by board comments in the Masonic Homes historical record, the modernist succeeded: “The beauty, style, utility and arrangement of the cottages reflect the dedication of our Master Plan Architect, A. Quincy Jones, and his associates.”
More than 50 years later, Jones’s hallmarks are still meeting the Masonic Homes’ needs, as evidenced by how they inspired Matt Smith, principal architect with SmithGroup and designer of the Citrus Heights Health Center. Like Jones, Smith created an open, airy environment, using floor-to-ceiling windows, stone, wood paneling, decorative screens, and lighting that emphasizes simplicity of form—elements that are also used in Jones’s mid-century work. The continuity is deliberate.
Shared values bridge a fraternity built on structures and character to an architect who shaped both through design. As Smith says, “Just as truth is a fundamental tenet of Freemasonry, Jones’s work reveals truth in architecture through honest expression.”
Illustration by:
Eddie Guy
Photo Courtesy:
UCLA/Charles E. Young Research Library
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