Jones,
Partners : Architecture (USA)
Wesley Jones (1958)
Wesley Jones (1958)
Since
the mid-1980s, Wes Jones has been exploring avenues of "machine-architecture",
looking for an organization between the body and its technological world,
in quest of a vernacular way of expressing mechanical and industrial forms.
After working for many years in partnership with Holt, Hinshaw & Pfau,
he founded Jones, Partners: Architecture, in 1993, first in San Francisco,
then in Los Angeles. Wes Jones's projects are exaggerated extrapolations
of Le Corbusier's "machines à habiter" (machines for living
in), often suburban homes in California. Above all, they assert the need
to situate architecture at the heart of the relationship between people
and their environment, with this latter conceived as a sort of mechanical
ecumene or inhabited area, somewhere between nature and artefact. His Silverlake
PRO/Con project is a minor one involving collective housing units, presented
like a stacking/appropriation of industrial containers linked together by
a Piranesi-like distribution area on three levels. In his Moving Architectures,
a set of houses made up of modules sliding on tracks, he is keen to contradict
the at once spatial and temporal fixedness of architecture, and introduce
a real flexibility into the household space.