Suburbia Produces a Model of Efficiency

Architect Wes Jones is obsessed with the postwar landscape. In his mind, the world hums with the sound of heavy-duty appliances; structures move with the grinding efficiency of Apollo launch pads; and the two-car garage is still an emblem of domestic bliss.

Over a short but prolific career, the 41-year-old Los Angeles architect has transformed these images into buildings that seem imbued with the Cold War suburban male’s chilling faith in technology. In his design for the 1994 Chiller Energy Plant at UCLA, for instance, a jumble of pipes, chimneys and ducts seemingly bursts through the structure’s thin brick cladding, a warning of the destructive potential contained within its walls. But what gives Jones’ best work true substance is that it never slips into parody. His interest lies in exposing the tensions buried in his generation’s collective past. His work is sometimes playful, never silly.

In his recently completed Silver Lake house for a jazz musician, Jones turns his analytical eye to the banalities of suburban life. Set back into the side of a hill along a barren commercial strip, the house’s machine-like interior is neatly packed into a tough concrete shell. The design’s clean lines evoke both the Los Angeles Case Study houses of the ‘50s--those classic modern masterpieces that recently have become yuppie status symbols--and the endless rows of banal bungalows that define much of the sprawling Southern California landscape.

But if this is a model for a new Levittown, it is a Levittown deformed by its own hyper-reality. In a twist on typical images of suburban paranoia, the structure’s main facade functions as a highly refined screening device, both surveillance platform and protective barrier. The entry--a narrow steel door tucked along one side of the building--is nearly invisible from the street. An enormous two-story picture window is set back into the concrete facade, like a gleaming mechanical eye or an over-scaled television screen. The effect is a voyeuristic detachment between inner and outer worlds; look, the building seems to say, but don’t touch.

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Inside, the building is divided into two parallel zones, one social, the other private. The house’s main space is a 26-foot-tall rectangular, loft-like room, lined with industrial gadgetry. Two huge doors open directly into the garage. A narrow steel stair--its tube-like rails and steel plates evoking the taut efficiency of a submarine--leads up to a series of compact bedrooms before reaching an exterior deck in back. This is a highly efficient world, one where the typical functions of the home are plugged into the mainframe like the support mechanisms of a spacecraft.

The loft’s most sensational feature, however, is a massive gantry that can be cranked back and forth on rails above the living room. The gantry’s primary function is to allow the client to reach a vast collection of drum sets, which are stored along two steel racks that run the length of the living room. But what makes the gantry successful as an architectural device is that Jones imbues it with multiple meanings. Crank it up to the front of the building, flip down its steel rails, slide open the windows, and it creates a wide balcony that looms over the sidewalk below. Crank it to the back end of the room and it becomes a more intimate, internal mezzanine. The drums, meanwhile, become fetishized objects, colorful icons for adolescent garage bands.

On a more subtle level, the entire room functions as a kind of crude camera obscura. On the first floor, for instance, an abstracted view of natural and artificial surfaces is framed by a long slot window, as if you were watching the world go by through the gun-slot of a tank. But as you draw into the house, the eye slowly focuses in on a more picturesque view of the opposing hill, a landscape cluttered with telephone poles, sagging bungalows and scruffy trees. The effect is to make you highly sensitive to the degree of intimacy you share with the world outside.

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That notion of a built-in self-awareness continues on the upper floors. The bedrooms--clad in corrugated plastic with slot-like windows framing carefully controlled views of the sky--are small, private sanctuaries, their plastic cladding illuminated by florescent lights embedded in the walls. The toilet, bath and shower are all anchored to a single steel frame set in the center of the bathroom, so that the daily rituals of washing attain a heightened--almost self-conscious--sense of efficiency.

For the early Modernists, of course, the appeal of the “machine for living” was not only its ability to effect social change, but also its potential for mass production. Workers, they believed, would one day construct houses like any other industrial object, assembling them out of a kit of parts with the smooth efficiency of Henry Ford’s famous cars. And Jones, too, conceives his house as a prototype that would expand to other sites in the neighborhood.

But Jones is also keenly aware of Modernism’s failures. He has no illusions about architecture’s ability to impose a new social order, nor does he believe in universal truths. Instead, he locates architecture’s social potential in its ability to spark the imagination. “I think to make architecture relevant today, a building should function like a small seed that begins to suggest an entirely different kind of city,” he said in a recent conversation.

In a healthy culture, where all sorts of competing values are allowed to grow and flourish, such a vision would become one component in a vast field of experimentation, one where one of architecture’s many functions would be to challenge received notions about who we are and how we live. Not a bad alternative to the old American Dream.