W es Jones is adamant.

"The architect's role," he insists, "is to place us in our world, to say something about how we live."

A building isn't just a building, declares the Los Angeles architect, author and academic, but an argument for the better world that has yet to be created, a proposal, suggestion, or model.

But architecture is also an economic and bureaucratic exercise, subject to the pressures of time, money and rules as much as gravity and climate.

"Architecture constitutes most of the environment we live in," Jones points out. "Architecture gains its right to impose on us by accepting this responsibility."

But, he adds, "North American culture isn't attuned to the possibilities of what architecture can do." Alas, neither are many North American architects.

Known for his tech-heavy projects – everything from houses to theatres to cooling plants – Jones has been spending time at the University of Toronto architecture school, where he holds this year's Frank Gehry International Visiting Chair in Architectural Design.

"I like Toronto," says the Santa Monica-based practitioner. "It's like New York without all the depressing parts. Like most Americans, I see Canada as a nicer, better version of the U.S. I feel inherently safer here."

Regardless of where we live, Jones continues, we share one essential characteristic: "We're no longer able to have a direct experience of nature."

It's not that nature is dead; it has been replaced by technology, which reveals natural processes as it replaces them.

"Technology teases nature into unhiddenness," says Jones, quoting German philosopher Martin Heidegger. "The world is not available to us except through technology; technology makes things visible."

Which brings us to Jones' other point, namely that every building is a machine for doing something. The idea comes, of course, from Le Corbusier's (in)famous remark that a "a house is a machine for living in." Though the comment appears to reduce that most sacred of spaces – the human habitation – to something cold and mechanical, Jones argues that in the most literal sense it is true.

Which may be why Jones' buildings tend to look extraordinarily complex; like the hot-rodders he so admires, he derives enormous pleasure from the physical facts of architectural structures – beams, stairwells, windows, louvers and the like.

One of the projects documented in an exhibition of Jones' work at the school's Eric Arthur Gallery (230 College St.), is F2, a "souped up" response to Mies van der Rohe's celebrated glass residence, Farnsworth House.

"It elaborates or extends the logic of the iconic features of the original," Jones explains. The best part of Mies' structure, he says, was less the thing itself than the idea behind it. His task was to marshal technology to its service – but not to hide it in the process.

Indeed, Jones' creations have an exaggerated industrial aesthetic that verges on fantasy.

"... the work," Jones writes in his most recent book, El Segundo, "is a product of that same uniquely American spirit of technological bricolage that produces the hot-rod and the lunar rover."

Though Jones insists his architecture represents a strictly rational, technologically informed response to a given need, his buildings speak a similar architectural language. Jones's fascination with corrugated steel walls, shipping containers and exposed structures bring a post-apocalyptic edge to his projects.

The beach houses are elegantly minimalist, the UCLA Chiller Plant makes a monument of machinery, but some of his "packaged homes" of stacked ISO containers anticipate a happily improvised future of recycled equipment and backyard innovation.

"I'm building a vernacular for a world that doesn't yet exist," says Jones.

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Not now, perhaps, but soon.

Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.ca