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JONES STUDIO HOUSES: Sensual Modernism

Jones Studio Homes: Sensual Modernism is a self-imposed limited look at the 40-year-plus career of Eddie Jones. Almost unheard of outside the southwest United States, Jones has quietly accumulated a body of work ranging beyond residential design to include major federal projects impacting the edges of America… to be featured in a soon to be published monograph!

Supported by Aaron Betsky’s insightful forward, plus an enlightening interview with Vladimir Belogolovsky, and comments from many of his famous colleagues, Jones summarizes his lifelong dance with architecture through the personal stories embedded in each house. Refusing to repeat himself, the work tests the reality of gravity on a diverse spectrum of interpretive vernacular responses to climate, landscape and function. Although designed by the same hand, the forms vary as much as the choice of materials. Rammed earth, concrete, wood and metal are explored together and separately yet remain subordinate to Jones’ fascination with glass.

Utilizing photographs, hand-drawings and first-person accounts, the motivations and joy of being an architect are expressed by an exceptional whole informed by many ordinary parts.

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Stuccoed in Time at 99% Invisible

Santa Fe is famous in part for a particular architectural style, an adobe look that’s known as Pueblo Revival. This aesthetic combines elements of indigenous pueblo architecture and New Mexico’s old Spanish missions, resulting in mostly low, brown buildings with smooth edges. Buildings in the city’s historic districts have to follow a number of design guidelines so that they conform with the dominant style. Deviating from those aesthetics can stir up a lot of controversy.

But this adherence to the “Santa Fe Style” hasn’t always been the norm. For a time, there was actually a powerful push to “Americanize” the city’s built environment. Then, over a century ago, a group of preservationists laid out a vision for the look and feel of Santa Fe architecture, and in the process dramatically transformed the town.

Learn more about the controversies and conundrums of what some call Santa Fake, the history of adobe in Santa Fe, and the how preservation and tradition have been at odds with each other at 99% Invisible.

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Majara Residence

Iranian practice ZAV Architects drew on the colourful landscape of the island of Hormuz for this holiday community that is housed in around 200 brightly colored domes overlooking the Persian Gulf.

The project is a multitude of small-scale domes built with the superadobe technique of Nader Khalili, the innovative and simple technique using earth and sand packed into bags. Domes are familiar structures in the region. Their small scale makes them compatible with the building capabilities of local craftsmen and unskilled workers, which have been prepared for this project with previous smaller projects. Today they are trained master superadobe masons, as if Nader Khalili multiplied exponentially.

Learn more at Dezeen, ArchDaily

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H2OS

The H2OS project, or Open Source Prototype House for Eco-Villages in Senegal, is a prototype house constructed of compressed earth block, that can harvest and store water supplies for all domestic uses (drinking, cooking, washing, irrigation) and to integrate the scarce water resources in a few artificial walls. The project relies on ancient knowledge such as how to harvest rain water or how to ventilate rooms while incorporating up to date technologies for energy production from renewable sources. Learn more here.