Duvall Decker Interviewed by AIA for 2026 AIA Architecture Firm Award Honor

Duvall Decker was interviewed on receiving the 2026 AIA Architecture Firm Award by Jeff Seabold, FAIA, At-Large Director, AIA Board of Directors.

“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.”

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