Wes Jones

Jones has taught at various schools of architecture in the United States, including Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, IIT, Ohio State, UCLA, Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and UC Berkeley. Since 2015, Jones has been teaching at USC's School of Architecture, where he was named Architecture Discipline Head and Director of the Graduate Architecture program.

Jones has written extensively on a variety of topics not directly related to the particular buildings of the office. His interests have centered on either technology—its place or role in society, its relation to architecture—and the discipline of architecture, particularly as it has been affected by new advances in digital design technology. Most of the writings by Jones, and partners, Doug Jackson and Dora Epstein Jones, have been collected in the two monograph volumes that cover the work of J,P:A, Instrumental Form (1997) and El Segundo (2007). Jones continues to contribute to various publications related to architecture, such as Log and Harvard Design Magazine. During the 1990s Jones contributed a regular cartoon feature called “The Nelsons” to ANY magazine, a retrospective for which was recently held at the LA Forum, resulting in the publication of the collected series as Meet the Nelsons (2010). Jones used this medium to lambast the critical establishment of the time, for which ANY magazine was a leading platform.

In 1995 Jones and his firm began a study of the use of ISO standard shipping containers in design, with his project for air-delivered mountain cabins for the high Sierras. This eventually led to the development of the PRO/con or PROgram CONtainer system, debuted at the Hammer Museum in 1999. This system overcomes the limited repertoire of spaces available in container-based design (CBD) by interpolating conventional construction in the spaces between widely separated containers, using the containers as structural supports, rather than merely enclosure. The firm received a patent for this PRO/dek system, which modifies high density movable storage systems to support programmed activities in a space-saving way.

In 1993 Jones started his own firm, Jones, Partners: Architecture, in San Francisco; in 1997 the entire firm moved down to El Segundo in Southern California. This firm included then-spouse Dora Epstein Jones, partner, Doug Jackson, and project architects, James Rhee and Randolph Ruiz. Important buildings completed by the new firm include the Zimmer Plaza stair, a structural tour de force at the University of Cincinnati, the Confluence Point Bridges and Interpretive Center in San Jose, and the UCLA Chiller Plant and Campus Facilities Offices, as well as a number of residences around Southern California. The office also completed a number of competitions, including the Grand Egyptian Museum, Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, and the Royal Danish Theater and installations, such as the “Shuffle” project, installed in the SCI-Arc gallery, in which several columns suspended from bridge cranes rearranged themselves throughout the course of the exhibit to demonstrate space-defining effects.

Important Buildings and projects designed by Jones include the Astronaut's Memorial (1991), UCLA Chiller Plant and Campus Facilities Offices (1994), San Jose Repertory Theater (1996), the NYTimes Capsule competition finalist (1999) and Sub-‘burb 2025 House of the Future, for Time Magazine (2000).

SOUPING UP The term “souping up” appears often in his writings and lectures. The term originated in the hot rod culture of Southern California. Jones uses it to name a process of upgrading or enhancing an architectural type or program, using more advanced technology or more adventurous form. He relates this process to the way in which a jalopy is turned into a hot rod; in its early form he emphasizes its lower tech “American” roots, contrasting it with the “haute tech” way a Ferrari might be designed. [Instrumental Form, 109] In later writings he talks about it more from the standpoint of its inherent respect for the original object, in order to separate it from the critical practices of “deconstructivism,” which depend to some extent on a more violent treatment of their “hosts.” [El Segundo, 307] The “souping up” technique, which Jones also sees as offering a critique of the meaninglessness of the “form finding” operations of “diagram” architecture and the negativity of conventional critical architecture, has been used in many of the buildings that he has designed. Indeed, he has called the Astronaut's Memorial a souped up version of the Viet Nam Veterans Memorial (by Maya Lin 1982).

Jones attended the United States Military Academy at West Point from 1976 to 1978 where he achieved academic distinction, being named a “distinguished cadet” or “starman.” From West Point Jones transferred to the University of California at Berkeley, from which he graduated in 1980, receiving and AB “with Highest Honors,” and giving the student commencement address. This speech was a joint effort of Jones and several of his classmates. Together they had gathered samples of the graffiti for which the College of Environmental Design's Wurster Hall was famous at the time, and Jones read the sometimes scatological collection on this august occasion in a twenty-minute monologue. Jones next attended the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. After producing a thesis that offered a critical homage to Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation, Jones received a Master of Architecture with Distinction in 1984. In his final semester at the GSD Jones served as a teaching assistant for the first of Peter Eisenman’s three studios there, and he joined Eisenman’s office, Eisenman/Robertson after graduating.

Wesley Jones (b. Santa Monica, California January 27, 1958) is an American architect, educator and author. Founding partner of Holt Hinshaw Pfau Jones, in 1987 and then Jones, Partners: Architecture in 1993, Jones is a leading architectural voice of his generation, advocating for a continuing appreciation of the physical side of technology within a world increasingly enamored of the virtual. For most of his career this has taken the form of an overt fascination with mechanical expression, both static and moving, and his designs have been celebrated for their "engaging operability” and humor. In his early writings he focused on making the case for the appropriateness of mechanical form in architecture, but his later essays have also taken on more fundamental disciplinary questions, particularly with respect to the growing hegemony of digital design.