The Firm That Stayed

I have a confession to make before this interview begins. I am not a neutral party.

Roy Decker was my professor in fifth-year studio at Mississippi State. For years after that, our offices sat two doors apart in Fondren, a neighborhood in Jackson that was, at the time, still figuring out what it wanted to be when it grew up. We have both worked in Midtown, the neighborhood just east of downtown, for much of our careers. We have both built practices that go considerably further than what most people mean when they say the word architect. So when the College of Fellows asked me to conduct this interview, I understood the assignment to be something more than journalism.

It was also, in a way, a homecoming.

Roy Decker, FAIA, and Anne Marie Duvall Decker, FAIA, founded Duvall Decker Architects in Jackson, Mississippi in 1998. They started in the attic of their house in Belhaven, built a stair on the outside so contractors could come up without using the front door, and began doing the work. Twenty-eight years later, their 22-person studio has completed federal courthouses, civil rights research centers, affordable housing master plans, public libraries, and academic buildings across the state and region. They also employ three part-time custodians, a maintenance director, and a maintenance specialist, because they decided early on that an architect's responsibility to a building does not end at substantial completion.

In March 2026, we sat together in their current studio on North State Street in Jackson, a tight room where every desk is filled and Roy, by his own admission, has been working out of a closet. Their new mass timber office is being finished next door. The conversation that follows has been edited for length and clarity, which was no small task, because these two people do not say small things.

JS: Jeff Seabold
RD: Roy Decker
AMD: Anne Marie Duvall Decker

THE LIGHTNING ROUND

We opened, as I do with every interview, with a few fast questions meant to reveal character before the conversation turns serious.

JS:  Where did you go to school?
RD:  Master's degree from Kent State in Ohio.
AMD:  Mississippi State University
JS:  What are you currently reading?
AMD:  I have been reading, for way too long, the Eric Larson book on the run-up to the Civil War. It has taken me a year to get through it, which doesn't say much for my reading pace, but Eric Larson is one of my favorite authors. Devil in the White City is still one of my favorites.
RD:  I reread nonfiction. I have probably five books I go back to over and over. One of them I almost certainly assigned to Jeff when he was in school: John Dewey's Experience in Nature. And anything by Richard Sennett. Those are kind of bibles for me. Guideposts for thinking about society, experience, and how to ground architecture in communities.

JS:  A podcast?
AMD:  Criminal. Phoebe Judge is a great podcaster. She also does one called This Is Love, which seems like it wouldn't be related to a true crime podcast at all, but they totally are. There was a recent episode about the ballet Cry that I have listened to twice now.
RD:  I am not a podcaster.
JS:  A building you didn't design that you genuinely envy, and why?
RD:  Alvar Aalto. Almost anything. His books and his buildings are where I go back to all the time. Our next trip is Finland. We are going to finally get there.
AMD:  Ronchamp is still a touchstone for me. We went together years ago, and then on a family trip to Paris recently we saw several more Corbusier buildings we hadn't seen. And every time I go to Chicago, I go to the Art Institute, and I walk Carol Ross Barney's Riverwalk. Every time.

JS:  Hobbies?
RD:  I paint. Very amateur. Mississippi landscapes, and the characteristic of my paintings is that there are no people and no buildings in them. Trees, ground, and sky. It is therapy, and it is research into the light and character of this landscape. I have an Instagram for it. I never sell them. They are all still in our house. I did give one to Anne's sister. That may be it.
AMD:  I am a pianist and an amateur composer. I recently had my piano rebuilt. It is the piano I learned on, that my parents bought from my teacher years ago. I have had it my whole life. It was old when they gave it to me. And now it has been completely rebuilt by a tuner here in Jackson, and it is like I cannot believe it is the same piano. I am reinvigorated. I am getting back to playing and composing.

PART ONE: HOW A FIRM BEGINS

Before we got into the prepared questions, I wanted to go back to a moment that Roy described early in our conversation. I asked what, exactly, Anne Marie had said to him in 1997 that started all of this.

JS:  You were describing the conversation where Anne Marie said something that became the founding sentence of the firm. What was it?
RD:  Anne said to me, 'If you want to teach, and you want to teach in a different way, why don't we think about making a firm as an example of what an architect could be?” What a firm could be in a place like Mississippi. That was the sentence. And it also was the sentence that challenged us to think differently, even though we didn't know what that meant at the time.
AMD:  I had fallen for Jackson. For Mississippi. That really came through working with Wayne Timmer and doing the historic structures report on the Medgar Evers house. I was going to the archives, watching films from the civil rights era, reading Myrlie Evers. I realized that history was so alive here. Because we're not a thriving economy, our built environment hasn't been obliterated. Our history is still in the built environment. I used to get my Christmas trees at the Quonset huts at the Fairgrounds before they moved them. And then I was reading about civil rights workers being imprisoned in those same Quonset huts during Freedom Summer. And I was like, "That is where I buy my Christmas trees.” That weird conflagration is what struck me. You can really dive into what happened here and think about it before you build.

JS:  What is the actual difference between building a practice in a place versus just opening a firm?
AMD:  Opening a firm is a business activity. Building a practice in a place is about using what you have learned to contribute back. It is not just a capitalist enterprise.
RD:  It is about meaning. And we learned early that the origins of the place, the origins of the people, the stories of the place were important to carry forward. But we also learned that history as a sweet memory of a past that never existed, the nostalgic side, was not a path for us. Remembering was a tool to do better in the future. There was a progressive ambition to everything we were doing. To make a better Mississippi, not to make somebody's idea of what old Mississippi was.

PART TWO: THE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENED

Their current studio on North State Street is a tight room. Every desk is taken, and Roy has, in recent months, migrated to working from what he describes, without evident complaint, as a closet. I have been in this building before. I have seen how closely these people work together in both their offices in Fondren. I asked whether that friction had been the secret sauce.

JS:  Has the crowding actually been the thing that made the culture?
AMD:  It is oddly not friction. Well, I mean, it is, but it is not negative friction. There are no partitions. There is no oversized space. People learn from listening to each other. There are soft lessons happening all day that would not happen if there were walls between them. And COVID was really hard for us. It was really hard not to be here. When we could come back together, we came back. I have colleagues across the country who still cannot bring their people back to the office. People don't want to come. I genuinely do not understand that.
RD:  It is part of the secret. Our team, they are friends. They eat out together. We have a bowling team. They play pickleball in the backyard. They hang out in different groups. And I think we have gotten better, over the last four or five years, at cultivating the group. At getting together and having real conversations. We have these things we call in-office inquiries, where we get together, have lunch, and either do intentional lessons or just share what everyone is working on. We also invite anyone in the studio to be a critic on any project. We call it roaming rights. Everyone has roaming rights.

JS:  You are designing your new office right next door, with more room. How do you make sure the spatial upgrade doesn't accidentally slow the firm down?
RD:  It is designed for about five more people. Not that much bigger. It is one big studio, everyone together, a little more space to spread out as our team manages bigger projects. But it is the same spirit. And here is the thing: we do not want to grow much larger. Twenty-five is our sweet spot. Because it allows Anne and me to still work on every project. I am still doing construction administration. Anne is still writing specs. We are still critics on everything. We want to be architects in a firm. Not managers of a firm.

PART THREE: THE JANITOR ON THE PAYROLL

The thing about Duvall Decker that stops people when they first hear it is not their portfolio, impressive as it is. It is the staff roster. Of their twenty-two employees, five work on the building care and maintenance side of the practice, including three part-time custodians, a maintenance director, and a maintenance specialist. I asked Anne Marie how that came to be.

JS:  Where did the maintenance model come from?
AMD:  We were working for a young superintendent in Newton, Mississippi, named Dr. Mina Bryan. She kept calling us. 'Can I turn off these indoor air quality units in the summer? The electric bill is expensive.' And then, 'Can you come help me interview janitors?' And one day I thought, " Why don't architects provide maintenance services? We know how to care for the buildings we do. We put together operations manuals with the contractor. Why are we not supporting our clients after the ribbon-cutting?”
RD:  We set up the building care and maintenance business. We did it as a studio, not as a fully separate entity. That was intentional. Because all the employees, all the knowledge, comes from the studio. The idea was that we were starting before projects existed, through planning work, and continuing after projects were complete, through maintenance. We were expanding the time we were involved in a building's life. That became the origin of what we call the design of a practice.

JS:  Does having a maintenance director two desks over change how a project manager details a floor transition?
RD:  Yes. The knowledge runs both ways. The maintenance staff knows what fails and what holds. The architects know what should be specified. Having that conversation in the same room, constantly, makes both sides better. It is a virtuous cycle.
AMD:  And it changes how we think about every material decision. Not just aesthetically, not just technically, but in terms of real long-term cost to a client who often has very limited resources. In Mississippi, that matters enormously.

PART FOUR: WHAT MIDTOWN TAUGHT US

I want to be transparent about something. I built the digital model for the Midtown Master Plan. The Deckers hired me to contribute to their master plan, and it was one of the first projects I undertook after going out on my own in 2009. The model still exists in Duvall Decker's files. The Midtown neighborhood, a historically underinvested area just north of downtown Jackson, is a place where both practices have contributed. Duvall Decker's contribution is, by any measure, the more substantial one: over sixteen years, the firm has helped produce more than sixty affordable homes, converted a run-down liquor store into a health clinic and barbershop, helped land a Millsaps College’s business school incubator, facilitated a United Way Prosperity Center for financial counseling, and worked to broker the redevelopment of two closed public schools. None of that is architecture in the narrow sense. All of it is practice in the full sense.

JS:  What does it feel like to stand in Midtown today compared to when you first started working there?
AMD:  It feels remarkably good to feel like we had some input into that improvement. But interestingly, when we show it to people who come through, they don't always see how successful it is. Because it still looks like a tough neighborhood when you drive through. And I think that is actually the success. It has not been obliterated. It is still itself, but better.
RD:  Before the master plan, two hundred Habitat homes had been built there, and they were starting to be abandoned. We asked residents why people were leaving Habitat homes. And what we learned was that families were outgrowing them. There were no other housing types in the neighborhood. People were leaving not because they wanted to, but because they were becoming more successful, needed larger houses, and had nowhere to go within the community. That taught us early about the need for a variety of housing types as part of community revival. We built two and three-bedroom houses at two stories, which was unique to the neighborhood. Later, on a tax credit project on Millsaps Avenue, we convinced the developer not to knock everything down. We renovated twelve or thirteen existing houses. All of that came from listening.
JS:  What is the actual difference between what happened in Midtown and gentrification?
RD:  The most important goal of the master plan was to protect the residents. And here is the key thing we learned: if you can instigate a series of small interventions, small developments that appraisers can use as comparables, you elevate everybody's property value. So, everybody in the neighborhood gains. We were manufacturing money for existing residents. Not pricing them out. Building them up. And we paired that with affordable housing, which protects existing opportunities even as values rise. Planning in at-risk neighborhoods has everything to do with the value of the land for the people already there.

PART FIVE: THE WORK ITSELF
I asked about the Mississippi Library Commission project, which opened in 2005 and remains one of the most discussed works in the firm's portfolio. I had framed the question as asking about the project that changed them most. Roy answered by explaining what question they had asked themselves at the start of the commission.

JS:  Tell me about the project that changed you the most.
RD:  The library commission was formative in a particular way that is still working itself out through our work. The question we asked ourselves at the start was: could we design a state institution that shifted authority from the institution to the individual? In Mississippi, in Jackson, institutions have a history of not respecting individuals. Of being an authority, of controlling behavior. We thought: could every person who walks in there feel like it is their building? Their space, their path, their choices? And could the building ignite curiosity? Could it be an analog clock, not a digital one, changing with the weather, alive in the morning and different in the afternoon?
AMD:  And we developed this vocabulary around avoiding narrative content. Robert Irwin, the idea of not naming things. Everything in that building is an attempt to bring forward a characteristic, the warmth of the wood, the natural light through it, without being nameable or decorative. Everything was meant to be unnameable and alive.
RD:  And those strategies, the pause-and-move plan, the inner horizons, the idea of giving people choices at every moment rather than directing them, have been running through our work for twenty-eight years. The library commission set us in motion. We are still working those questions out.

The Bennie G. Thompson Academic and Civil Rights Research Center at Tougaloo College came later and pushed the firm in a different direction.

AMD:  At Tougaloo, Doctor Hogan came to us and said, 'I want you to take our civil rights photography collection and hang it on the walls. Put it in the architecture.' And we were like, narrative content? We cannot do that. You can't put that in architecture. But that is what she wanted. So, we had to figure out how to use that content to be architecturally and spatially effective. We made these memory theaters at the thresholds between spaces. It was scary to try. We would have never imagined we could make that work. It did change us. It pushed back on us in a way the library commission did not.

PART SIX: THE MYTH OF THE GOOD CLIENT

I had read about their philosophy on clients in their book, Foundations. They are skeptical of the myth of the perfect client, the one who writes checks and asks no questions. I asked for a real story.

JS:  Tell me about your most difficult good client.
AMD:  Graham Ashmeade. A brilliant doctor, long-term friend. Called us and said he was ready to build his retirement house. He wanted a Japanese tea house because his father had been a Fulbright scholar in Japan. He also wanted it to feel like a German castle. And it had to have a round Hobbit door with the Gandalf [Hobbit] mark on it.
RD:  So, it took us about four years to design this house. Graham was a multi-platform communicator. If he did not reach you by phone, he would text. Then a long email. Then call again. More communications from Graham than from almost all other clients combined. But here is the end of the story: he paid us the entire fee on day one. Wrote the check. And five years later, we had spent that fee five times over. We were basically indentured servants. But we love Graham. He sends us pictures of the deer out the window.
AMD:  We would never have designed that form on our own. You find out what a client needs, you respond to the site, and the massing comes from there. On this one, we had to work and rework the shape over and over. The house is entirely his. In that way, it is one of the most honest things we have built.
RD:  Principles are only principles when they are hard to hold. That was a moment where we were walking away from maybe the financial success of the firm. But things were going bad, and you can't try to make bad things better. You have to know when to walk away.

PART SEVEN: WHAT THE FELLOWSHIP MEANS

I asked this question because this piece is going to the College of Fellows. These are people who have spent careers in service to a profession that does not always reward service. I wanted to know what it had meant to Roy and Anne Marie to be in that company.

JS:  What does it mean to you to be part of the fellowship? Not the credential. The actual meaning of it.
AMD:  It gives me faith in culture. Knowing that there is a group, that those people exist, that they are that committed and rigorous and caring and conscientious about what they do. That those people exist is one thing that gives me immense hope. And then we have this organization that identifies them, with this week-long jury process and this sense of real honor about who gets selected. Both the organization and the individuals in it give me huge hope every day. You know, when you are young, you think, "I am going to get out into the world and meet more and more amazing people." And then you realize that it’s everybody who went to high school with you. It is just the same group of people, right? Meeting the fellows is like meeting all the people you always wanted to meet.
RD:  I grew up in a very poor family. First in my family to go to college, really, the only one. My parents did not know what an architect was. Did not know how to acknowledge success. So, you get a certain complex growing up like that. Getting the fellowship was an acknowledgement of value that I had never had before. The profession is saying to me: you have value, at an elite level of caring for the profession and the community. I still tear up about it. And in many ways, that validation strengthened my resolve. Maybe without the fellowship, we would not be a firm award winner.

PART EIGHT: THE WALL

I saved this question for last. Their name is about to be etched on the wall at the AIA Global Campus for Architecture & Design, alongside some of the most transformative firms and architectural leaders in the profession's history. It is a permanent thing. I wanted to know what they wanted it to say. And then I wanted to know whether that answer was the same as it would have been last November, before they got the call.

JS:  Your name is about to be etched on that wall. What do you want it to say about who you are?
AMD:  I have not let myself dwell on it. But while you were talking, I thought about Jackson and about where I grew up in West Tennessee, and I just think we are such unlikely people on that wall. Such an unlikely firm. And I think it is all about the fact that we chose to practice here. In Mississippi. In Jackson. You see all the things happening in the world right now, so much of it is a divide between people in cities and people in more rural places. And I am particularly excited that this honor came to a smaller city surrounded by rural land. I love that this firm, from Jackson, Mississippi, is going to be carved on that wall.
RD:  When I was a young architect in Philadelphia, I had a stirring. We were just pumping out buildings. Functional, technological, isolated, not connecting to communities or to people. And I felt, even then, that the profession was missing the cultural value of buildings, the meaningfulness of buildings to the people who live with them. It was early on that I started thinking about expanding the idea of what architecture could be. When Anne challenged me to start a firm as an experiment, that was it. The firm has been an experiment from the start on how to design a practice that answers those questions. We are still experimenting. We are still learning. But I am proud that we chose to practice in a place of need. That early on, we decided it was all public work, even a private home. It is an award for the way we responded to a place and crafted a firm. And that, in a way, is an award we share with every other small-town, small-city architect out there who cares more about their community than necessarily the transaction or the profit. My father told me early, "Do good work and the money will always be there.” We never had to give up on that. We still do not.

JS: Is your answer the same today as it was last November, before you got the call?
AMD:  I won't believe it until I can actually touch it on the wall. You can send me photos all you want. Until I run my hand across it, it will not feel real. And I always run my hand across that stone when I am at headquarters. That is what architects do.
RD:  I know those firms. I have studied those firms. To be on that wall is humbling in a way I did not expect. I think we are both full of imposter syndrome. But I am proud of the fact that we put ourselves out there to rethink what a practice could be. And now, to be on that wall, with those names? That is something I could not have said in November, because I had not felt it yet. Now I feel it. To be on that wall…Holy shit! (What we heard in the room filled with the Strategic Councilors and Board Members after voting when AIA President, Evelyn Lee, called Anne Marie and Roy to tell them they had won the 2026 Firm Award.  I couldn’t have planned a better ending for this interview, if I had tried.)