Jacques Mercier

Fauteux

Jacques Mercier Fauteux, 93, died of congestive heart failure on Monday, July 6, 2020, at his home on Revere Beach in Massachusetts. The son of Homère Mercier Fauteux and Thérèse (Jacques) Fauteux, Jacques was born and raised in Montreal, Quebec, where he enjoyed regular contact with his grandparents and many cousins. In 1941, his parents relocated to Massachusetts, so his father could pursue research in heart surgery at Harvard Medical School. As a teenager eager to escape Montreal's pro-fascist climate, Jacques petitioned his parents to join them in the States. He and his brother Pierre soon settled in Framingham, where Jacques attended high school, and on August 8, 1944, he became a U.S. citizen.

After high school, Jacques enlisted in the U.S. Navy. World War II came to an end while he was in boot camp, and he returned to Massachusetts where the mother of a friend helped him enroll in Cambridge Junior College (CJC). He always spoke fondly of his time at CJC, finding it both intellectually and socially rewarding. (Judging from the yearbook drawings, some of which he contributed, CJC students were a bunch of cool cats!) His time at CJC also proved auspicious. His classmate Sally Rounds introduced him to his future wife, Monna "Bette" Dingman. After a long courtship, the two married in 1953 and enjoyed a loving partnership lasting 61 years. Following her death in 2015, he hung three portraits of her in his dining room and always made a point of introducing Bette to anyone who visited his condo.

After graduating from CJC in 1948, Jacques spent a year at Parsons School of Design in New York City before enrolling at the University of Oklahoma (OU) to study architecture with Bruce Goff. He joined the Navy Reserves, and when the U.S. entered the Korean War, found himself on a second tour of duty that sent him to Coronado, California, and later on a Pacific cruise aboard an LST with stops in Hawaii and Japan.

Jacques graduated from OU in 1956 and moved to Connecticut, where he took his first professional job with Hartford-based Warren Ashley. Not long afterward, he and Bette moved to Holden, Massachusetts, where they raised their two daughters, Nicole Fauteux and Danielle Fauteux Jacques, and where Jacques served on the board of the town's historical commission. With his beard, bowtie, penchant for German cars, and acquaintance with the wider world, Jacques was an outsider in the small New England town. Nevertheless, he had no trouble making friends, chief among them his neighbors, the members of the "Als" club, Bette's Wheaton College classmates, and her colleagues at Wachusett Regional High School, who welcomed him into their fold and continued to bring him great joy until the end of his life.

For the better part of two decades, Jacques worked in partnership with his brother-in-law C. Wesley Dingman as half of the firm Dingman-Fauteux Architects. He also served a term as president of the Worcester County chapter of the American Institute of Architects. During a hospital stay in June, he was delighted to meet a nurse who had attended classes on the Knight Campus of Rhode Island Community College, a structure he worked on in the 1960s and 70s. The project was one highlight of a satisfying career focused primarily on the design of schools, libraries, and other civic buildings, including alterations to the Chelsea Theatre Works, the historic home of his daughter Danielle's Apollinaire Theatre Company.

In 1978, Jacques designed and built a house for himself and Bette on Lovewell Pond in Hubbardston. He dubbed it Walden 3, and after briefly commuting to his office in Worcester, he established a new firm, Walden 3 Associates.  Seeing the professional potential of Apple's new personal computer, he invested in a MacIntosh and adopted digital drafting and word processing tools, becoming one of the first architects to work remotely from the woods before many people realized this was possible. His decades-long association with Verizon proved pivotal to his firm's success. He worked on dozens of projects as the telephone company assumed different identities across the decades, and he formed strong and enduring friendships with respected colleagues in the process.

While living in Hubbardston, Jacques made the house he designed a gathering place for friends and family and a retreat where he shared his reverence for nature and his political opinions with his grandchildren, Joel and Benjamin Simon. He grew and canned vegetables, went cross-country skiing in the woods, and served for a time as president of the Lovewell Pond Sporting Club. He also became an active member of the Hubbardston Historical Society and the Hubbardston Democratic Town Committee. A proud supporter of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his youth, over the years he supported a series of progressive candidates including Shirley Chisholm, Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, and most recently, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

No remembrance of Jacques would be complete without a reference to his trips abroad.  In 1969, he and the family took their first trip to Europe, igniting a love of travel that took him and Bette to almost every continent, including out-of-the-way places such as Syria, Greenland, and the Soviet Union. After Bette's death in 2015, he traveled to Iran, the one country she refused to visit. He and his daughter Danielle subsequently visited Barcelona, the Azores, Iceland, and the Canadian Rockies together. He returned to Montreal with his daughter Nicole to celebrate his 90th birthday with cousins in 2017; enjoyed another family reunion and architectural tour of Chicago last September; and embarked on one last trip in January of this year to celebrate the birthday of his sister-in-law Helen and visit with other family and friends in Los Angeles.

He maintained close relationships with his two daughters, his grandsons, his son-in-law, Robert Simon, and a remarkable number of other relatives and friends up until his last days. He frequently remarked on how blessed he was to have married into the Dingman/Cox family and to have made new friends in Revere following Bette's death.

So many who have written this week noted that they looked up to Jacques as someone who embraced adventure and knew how to live life well. In that spirit, we offer you several ways to honor his memory.

1. Pour yourself a drink (preferably gin).
2. Drive a nice car (a Tesla if you can).
3. Eat raw oysters.
4. Listen to piano jazz.
5. Spend time by the water.
6. Admire something beautiful.
7. Plan a trip to a place you've never been.
8. Vote blue in November.

If you'd like to make a donation in his honor, Amnesty International, J Street, the ACLU and WGBH are among the charities he supported.

We continue to encourage family and friends who wish, to offer condolences at this time by means of the online guest book or to send a personalized sympathy card (see below)

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