In this interview, Wes Jones reflected on a career connected to avant-garde U.S. architectural discourse yet marked by an independent position. In the mid-1980s, he worked with Peter Eisenman as a teaching assistant and on the Wexner Center, later editing a special issue of ANY and contributing a weekly cartoon. Yet Jones resisted successive fashions, from the digital avant-garde and Deleuzian diagrams to projective discourses of affect and sensation, instead developing a consistent body of projects and theory.
Central to his thinking is the argument that industrial technology’s mechanical scale has shaped everyday life since the mid-19th century. Combined with U.S. traditions of pragmatism, self-reliance, and garage-based tinkering, it has produced an overlooked mechanical vernacular. Jones argued that the avant-garde’s pursuit of novelty obscures this condition. His projects instead present architecture as a shared, accessible, and pragmatically produced vernacular rather than as singular artistic creations. He has recently devoted increasing attention to teaching and writing while continuing to develop these ideas.