Victor Jones thinks about Los Angeles in a way few people do: he thinks about it in the future tense, as a place of myriad possibilities. “Los Angeles, unlike most well known cities, is a twenty-first century paradigm in terms of its ability to inform how people live and what people do and how they experiences civic and public space. It is a new physical model of urbanity: I think Los Angeles is a fantastic case study.”
“Thats the draw here,” he says. “While perfect weather, a great economy, and geography have made life easy to take for granted my work in academia and design pushes back on the city, forcing people to reconsider the evidence of things not seen. This push back is to say—Hey.—let’s stop and revisit this, acknowledging that we are a part of a discussion, that we are not completely inside ourselves and that we are becoming a greater reference globally. When we look at urban development in Beijing, Dubai, Mexico City for example, Los Angeles has become a reference versus traditional nineteenth century cities. Let’s try to understand the physical implication of these things.”
Victor is an architect. He is also a writer and professor fascinated by this city and how it conducts itself through design. His practice is housed in two physical locations: out of his home in the Silver Lake and in a studio space in an classic Hollywood building off of Cahuenga. This morning, Victor is working from home. He is seated at his dining room table, a marble multi-purpose setting for dining and working. There are stacks of beautiful, brainy books and a humming Macbook. A cup of water is placed next to a miniature saucer full of spiced walnuts. A worn sample copy of his new book (IN)Formal L.A. has its own undisturbed territory. A few magazines are open, turned to pages of topical stories about California.
This afternoon, Victor works from his office. It’s a slim hall whose age is present in small details like its heavy doors and antique window fixtures. Similar marks of his work are present—library books, influential magazines, early drafts of (IN)Formal L.A.—in addition to models and building materials. The space is lived in like his home but markedly focused on the practice of designing.
These work habitats are a fusion of Victor’s many influences, which can be distilled to being part Angeleno and part foreign cosmopolis. Both identities are weighed equally as he has a gaze fixed to both: Los Angeles is his home but other cities and other urban settings are just as important to him.
The irony is that Victor is a native who never liked it here. “I always hated Los Angeles,” he explains. “I was always overwhelmed by the expanse and horizontality of the city and the lack of continuity. It wasn’t until I moved back from France and got my driver’s license that a whole new relationship with the city emerged.”
“I really didn’t get to know the city that I was born and raised in until my late thirties,” he adds. “That’s when I began to understand how special this place is.”
Victor had lived in Los Angeles from birth through late elementary school and high school. He attended Cal Poly San Louis Obispo for his undergraduate degree in Architecture and found the experience to be quite profound: it created opportunities to try different metropolitan settings. “My Architectural History professor, Dr. Joseph Burton, radically changed my life: he proposed that I moved to Paris after graduation to work,” Victor explains. “Initially, I was very resistant to the idea. But, what was supposed to be a three month internship ended up being twelve years living in Paris: that was a life changing experience. I never thought that I would end up back in Los Angeles! I completely found myself and found a completely different world order in France.”
Paris brought a lot of important things to his life: he met his partner of twenty five years, he worked for Jean Nouvel and Louis Vuitton, and took a break during his time there to get a graduate degree in Architecture from Harvard. After, he found himself back in Paris—but soon left to further his own practice. “We arrogantly thought our club membership to Paris would never expire,” he says. “There was a lot of discussion between my partner, Alain Fièvre and I on where to go and we decided that Los Angeles was the best place for an architectural practice, Fièvre + Jones. So, we came here in the late nineties. It is a very challenging experience to uproot our Parisian existence and move to the United States.”
“We do miss Europe quite a bit, though,” Victor says with a longing—but positive—undertone. “That’s what brought us to Silver Lake and to an office in Hollywood: we’re such urban creatures that we were looking for that simulacrum of urbanity in Los Angeles. Both Silver Lake and Hollywood have their own special version of that, Silver Lake being a bit of Brooklyn and Hollywood being a bit like every popular zone in every major city in the world. From certain angles, Hollywood may look like Times Square in the eighties and, from another it may look like Pigalle in Paris. It has a very special and unique quality to it.”
You could confuse his comparisons for nostalgia but analyzing Los Angeles in this manner is Victor’s job: he studies space, formed communities, and urban infrastructure to discover its flaws and successes. “My principal concentration at USC’s School Of Architecture is research on community based projects and understanding what that means in a post-racial culture. Rather than looking at community service as a direct response to under-served individuals or minorities, I look at how we as a more urban, global, and heterogenous community can construct a better quality of life.”
“I think so much of that came out of the Rodney King riots. We were in Paris at the time and a friend called us to tell us to turn on the television: I was shocked because I had grown up in a completely multicultural, multiracial context in Los Angeles where I was never conscious of racial tension. That riot made me realize the bubble that I had existed in Los Angeles was not the same ecosystem or social jungle that everyone else was living in: there were real and true divisions in the city. Coming back here, most of my preoccupation has been to understand the truly unique moments in Los Angeles’ history and contemporary modes break down the ideas of segregation or insular social enclaves completely fed within themselves. This city has always been about being free to roam in and out of circumstances.”
“We are one of the most diverse cities in the world and have had incredible moments of integration. Watts is an example: up until World War II, it was 20 x 4: African Americans, Whites, Asians, Native Americans, and Hispanics all lived together harmoniously. In that neighborhood, there have been moments where cohabitation existed in a very peaceful way. My research tries to look at moments where there was not hostility or separation, to build upon the idea to see where they exist today and question areas in the city where those kinds of exchanges are not promoted.”
Victor believes that one of the best symbols of Los Angeles’ flaws are our roads. He’s not referring to the roads literally being bumpy or that it is often difficult to traverse but instead that roads serve as cultural and community boundaries, as ideological yellow tape. Who can get on the roads? Who can cross these roads? How do you travel these roads? These questions while simple relate to bigger issues that have defined Los Angeles.
“The freeway system, for example, has been a divisive factor in the way we perceive space in the city,” Victor says. “One of my bodies of research looks at the freeways not as a singular engineering feat but more of a socializing and de-socializing element of the city. I’m trying to understand the pros and cons of the freeways in our city. It comes back to trying to figure out bigger macrosystems instead of being an architect hoping a discrete project will be of greater consequences. There are bigger design systems in place that must be reconsidered and thought about more carefully to cultivate our commonwealth.”
He pauses his thoughts.
“I hope that isn’t too abstruse,” he laughs.
“There is a natural tendency to create villages for practical reasons. But, there is a beauty in having a passport to all neighborhoods. If you are of a certain curiosity, you’ll breach those boundaries, not letting your universe be defined by a street. But, [Angelenos] religiously stick to their boundaries. We have to question the curious way that infrastructures—like freeways—impact our lives, organizing us in as architect Craig Hodgetts says the mish-mosh we call Los Angeles.”
These views do not mean that Victor has a pessimistic view of Los Angeles. That is why he is so passionate about it changing for the better. Arguing for more opportunity for how people engage the city, he says, “Generally speaking, Angelenos tend to isolate themselves. They have a trajectory of work and home and their neighborhood. All due to limitations set by the city’s infrastructure – whether we are talking about public space, transportation, cultural institutions etc,” Some of my most fond memories of the city are from cinema and how ‘the industry’ illustrates the city. I remember in Pulp Fiction Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta would be in the Valley and then drive miles to another part of the city without any hesitation: the city in that film is a forest of pockets full of different opportunities. They were not restricted by cultural biases, distance, demographics – nothing stopped them from moving from one place to another.
“This is perhaps too romantic but it is my hope that one day, we will find we are very interconnected. Apprehensions of neighborhoods will melt. We will see a much greater mixing than there already is. People will move around more. There will be freer cultural and social exchanges. That is what I am seeking to promote in my teaching, research and professional practice.”
“Michael Govan’s decision to help conserve and preserve Watts Towers and declaring anew that south central is a destination point, is one of the most amazing things that is taking shape thanks to LACMA’s commitment to expand the reach of culture beyond affluent enclaves in the city. LACMA is about inclusive. In the seventies, great artists would go without apprehension to Watts – artists from Andy Warhol to William de Kooning. People would go there without questioning the distance or their safety. Michael Govan and those at LACMA embracing these cultural destinations outside of the elite circle of the city is an amazing thing. It speaks to enormous possibilities in terms of how we continue to enrich the urban landscape of the entire city.”
For Victor, his future is a just as positive: he is working on a few books and will be continuing his academic post at USC. He also envisions a time in the future where traveling the expanse of Los Angeles in a day will be different. “I love the idea of buying your bread in Santa Monica and your pot in Van Nuys and your shoes on 3rd Street,” he says. “seeing the city as a sea of opportunities, that are not confined by tribal or village boundaries. The way the city is structured offers that.”
“…but you have to get around the traffic,” he laughs. “Also, at least for now, it is not too sustainable.”
For more on Victor, check out his website. You can also find (IN)Formal L.A. here and here and Amazon.