TULSA, Okla. (AP) — Bob Jones came to Tulsa in 1954 to oversee design work for the new Civic Center, a radically modern project that attracted national and even international attention. A German publication declared it one of the "top architectural achievements in the world during the past century."

Raised in McAlester, Jones had served in the Navy during World War II before studying architecture at the University of Notre Dame and the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he learned from the famous Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a pioneer of modernism who popularized the "less is more" philosoph...