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The Jones boys never had a moment of doubt about what they were going to do with their lives. As older brother Eddie recalls, "At about six years old I knew I wanted to be an architect. I didn't know how to spell it or pronounce it, but that's what I wanted to be." Neal Jones explains, "I knew when I was in third grade that I wanted to be an architect, because that's what Eddie wanted to do."

Eddie Jones was not much older when he began preparing for his vocation. "Back in the late '50s my mother's women's magazines would publish Modern houses. They'd have floor plans as well as photographs. Early on I began to think in three dimensions and to learn how to read floor plans."

Growing up more or less marooned in Oklahoma, he had also given himself to American Modernism. "My parents bought the entire Encyclopedia Britannica , and I looked at every page. It probably took months. I got to W , and there was this small picture of a house on a waterfall, and it just knocked me out." Much later he realized the house was Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater.

The boys' father was a petroleum engineer. "I spent a lot of time out on oil wells," Eddie Jones says. "I learned how to operate heavy equipment and how to use a pipe wrench, and I learned how to catch frogs and eat at greasy spoons and inhale petroleum fumes, and it was pretty cool."

He adds, "Combine that with Oklahoma being the land of Bruce Goff, a great, great architect. I was able to see actual houses that he had designed under construction."

Eddie Jones went to Oklahoma State University, where the school of architecture was tucked into the School of Engineering. "To this day," he says, "I feel like I'm kind of an engineer in architect's clothes."

After graduation, he went to work for an architectural firm in Oklahoma City, which he describes as being none too strong on design. It didn't bother him, because, as he explains, "I needed to learn how to put buildings together. I'd never built anything other than my little forts and tree houses."

But after a year, he grew restless. "I'd gotten married, I had a baby, and there was a whole world out there that I knew nothing about." So with what the architect calls his "childhood naïveté," he announced, " We're going to move to Arizona!' We packed up our little hippie Volkswagen and our little baby boy and headed west to the land of Frank Lloyd Wright and Paolo Soleri and never looked back."

Once settled in Phoenix, Jones, in the course of his work for an architectural firm, traveled "all over the state photographing the indigenous architecture of the Native Americans. I got a short course in desert architecture."

After he'd been with the firm for five years, Jones's "naïveté" struck again. On the strength of a commission to design a residence, he opened his own office, which, he says, is "really funny. I had a drafting board in my empty third bedroom, and I siliconed Edward M. Jones, Architect' out by the front door, and I was in business." The first job led to a second, but he was still struggling financially, so he took a teaching job at Arizona State University.

The Jones brothers would go on to design what Eddie calls the largest building on the ASU campus. But Eddie Jones remembers as a young teacher "looking around at all the big buildings and thinking, I'm never gonna get to do one of these. And there we were, doing the biggest one they had. I'm very proud of that, because it reminds me of the whole magnificent and terrifying struggle."

Had it not been for his brother Neal, the struggle might have been more terrifying than magnificent. "If it weren't for Neal, I'd still be in that third bedroom," says Eddie Jones. "He has a gift for the business end of the profession. He enjoys marketing and managing the business and making sure everybody is working efficiently and making sure we're getting paid and all those things that I find annoying."

"We always knew that we wanted to work together one day," says Neal Jones. "It was just a matter of me catching up, getting the proper training before I joined him."

He did get his proper training, a bachelor of science degree in architecture from Oklahoma State, after which he did something unusual: "I knew that one of us needed to do the business thing, to run an office, so I went to the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana to get a double master's degree in architecture and business administration."

It wasn't easy. "It took three years," Neal Jones says. "I graduated probably with five people." The teachers were indifferent to conflicts in assignments. He had to contend with having "a studio project due the next day and two accounting tests, a statistics or a financial test. They didn't care."

With no fewer than three degrees, Neal Jones researched the market. "I identified my market sectors and sent out 222 résumés." This enterprise netted him a job with an Atlanta firm, where he stayed for five years. But in 1985 another older brother died. "I started thinking maybe it was time we got the family back together," he explains. "I moved to Phoenix with Eddie. I remember walking in the door that first time with my briefcase, setting it down and saying, Now what do I do?' "

Looking back on the last 20 years, Neal Jones can say, "It's been a hell of a ride. Our parents were scared to death that we were going to fight and break up the family," he recalls. "But at Jones Studio I can really say we've never had a fight—over anything. We have disagreements, but we don't yell and scream, kick the trash can or anything like that. We have common goals, a common philosophy, common beliefs. I do my thing, he does his thing."

Eddie Jones's thing, according to his brother, is to be the "lead designer." Of himself, he says, "I'm the guy who wears a coat and tie every day. He's the guy in the jeans and the sweatshirt."

The brothers and a staff of nine work at what Eddie Jones calls the family table. "It's about five feet wide and 40 feet long," he says. "We have little peninsulas for our computer stations. Everyone can see everyone. I can't imagine having a cubicle and a five-foot partition that I hide behind. We yell across the room, and we share just about everything. There are no private conversations. We play together, we work together, we get sad together and happy together. It's really a wonderful culture here. Then we've got the father figure, Neal, making sure it all keeps going."

Ask Eddie Jones what kind of project he would like to do that he hasn't yet done, and he says a skyscraper. "I don't care where. I just want to do one. I would love to live on the top of it. Other than that, I'd love to design a building at the bottom of the ocean."

And then Jones has another idea, "to do something habitable on the surface of the moon or Mars." The thought of a gravity-free environment seizes his mind, and he exclaims, "It would be really neat to get to change the rules."

At the Jones Studio, not even the sky is the limit.