Kevin Jones
Participant Statement
Kevin Jones is a practicing architect and Associate Professor of Practice in the School of Architecture + Design at Virginia Tech, where he teaches 4th-year Integrative Design Lab and Professional Practice. His experience in practice is diverse in type and scale and includes numerous adaptive reuse projects as well as housing, institutional, community, and cultural works.
His design work has been recognized by the Urban Land Institute and AIA Virginia. Kevin’s academic pursuits lie at the intersection of teaching, practice, and community engagement, and he has worked with both urban and rural communities on a variety of community-oriented impact design projects.
These include ongoing collaborations with the Virginia Tech Community Design Assistance Center, which partners student designers with community-based clients to develop conceptual designs for real-world applications.
Project Statement
My approach to Patterns of Place focuses on the intersection of nature, infrastructure, and human occupation in Southwest Virginia. As part of my teaching efforts, I work with students to develop design solutions for underserved rural communities in Appalachia. In traveling the region, we have learned that the narratives of these places are woven from nuanced threads defined by particulars of geography, extractive industries and large-scale agriculture, and the cultural traditions of the residents.
As an investigatory tool, the ‘drone’s-eye’ view offered a compelling and different way of exploring and understanding these phenomena that we had experienced on the ground during our travels. I was inspired by the work of photographer, Alex S. MacLean, and landscape architect, James Corner, who used aerial photography and collages to investigate similar questions in their book, Taking Measures Across the American Landscape (1996). Capturing subjects from above in abstracted, ‘plan view’ compositions helps change the scale of inquiry and invites new readings of the patterns that define the particular building culture of place.
