Don got me thinking today, who exactly is Wes Jones, what's his goal, why does he do what he does?  

So from what we know, Jones went to a military college, then Berkeley and graduated with "Highest Honors, giving the commencement speech (built around writings found in graffiti around the college), then Harvard to study design and eventually wrote an extremely successful thesis (that payed homage to Le Corbusier's Unite D'Habitation) which allowed him to graduate with a Master of Architecture with Distinction.  He went on to create a bunch of extremely stylized and unique buildings, buildings you wouldn't expect to see in the 80's and 90's.  If I were to describe his buildings, I'd say that they're broken down to the basics, exposed, naked.  He does away with the fancy cladding, no fancy bow ties and blazers for Mr. Jones's buildings.  What you're left with is structure, pure structure, and technology.  His buildings are ugly in their nakedness.  He designs these buildings in a postmodern era of architecture, where the norm was to design unique, geometrically puzzling buildings that are aesthetically pleasing, clean, well-clad.   Who is he trying to appeal to?

It feels to me like he's trying to appeal to those with an open hand (referencing what Don said on the 9th, closed fist vs. open hand), those who can appreciate the creation of something functional and stylish from primitive parts.  Wes Jones isn't an idiot who creates primitive architecture because he doesn't know what he's doing.  He's a well trained professional designer, he knows what he's doing.  What exactly is he doing?  

Well, lets take a look at Mr. Jones's shitty website.  "Home of BOSS Architecture".  Odd, he uses slang to describe his buildings.  He's also been known for using the term soup up", as in to "soup up a building", a term commonly used in the hot rodding community. Wondering what BOSS Architecture is, I take the "Taste Test", a horribly designed multiple choice quiz that reveals a little more about what BOSS architecture is.  Here's an answer I found kind of useful:  

"BOSS architecture relates to its occupants like an America’s Cup boat does to its crew: it’s always cool, and you could just cruise and enjoy the scenery, ignoring the boat itself, but it is there for you when you choose to pay attention—and when it's time to tack, it comes into its own, demonstrating why all those doohickies and thingamajigs are there, why the hull tapers as it does and what the color differences in the panels of the sail are all about. Everything is there for a reason, and it’s all tinged with the affect of purposefulness, even if it’s not doing anything at the moment."

Wes Jones is fascinated with the idea an interactive building.  He doesn't want a building that's designed to sit there and look pretty, or a building that's built with one single purpose; Wes Jones wants a building that engages its inhabitants, every part of a building has a function, and he wants to show the inhabitants what that function is, he wants to expose the purpose of each structural component of the building.  This results in unique, almost skeletal designs. 

So let's recap, Wes Jones is a well trained, top-of-the-class man with quite a few distinctions.  He's heavily influenced from non-conventional, gritty forms of art (graffiti, hot rods).  He loves stripping down a building to show it's purpose, so he designs heavily stylized, naked, primitive, buildings in an era where almost all buildings were designed to be pretty and clean. 

Wes Jones isn't ignorant, he's not just making primitive buildings because he wants to stand out, he's not doing it without a purpose, he's not... "modern art" (as Mark would say, no offense Mark).  He has a clear vision, a purpose, a mission.  He's going up to those closed-fisted Harvard and Berkley preps and showing them a new way to do something.  He's annoyed at the fact that the world of architecture at the time jumped onto this postmodern band wagon which preferred form over function.  He wanted to show the world that you can find a balance between both form and function, and he did this by designing stripped down buildings that were visually and physically engaging.  He's trying to show people that architectural beauty isn't only skin deep, it's not all about how elaborate and fancy, or twisted, contorted, geometrically challenging a building is.  He wants us to see that a Hot Rod can be as beautiful as a Benz, a graffiti artist is just as much of an artist as da Vinci was.  

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10/14/11

Post by Patrick Cheung