Few architects have embraced the playful potential of the profession as much as the American James Wines. Born in 1932 and originally trained as a sculptor and graphic designer, Wines established Sculpture in the Environment (SITE) in New York in 1970. Described as an ‘environmental arts organisation’, SITE went on to shape some of the pre-eminent works of architectural postmodernism, the majority of which have long since been demolished and live on only as ideas, writings and images.
What Else Could It Mean? is a monograph that brings together some of this material, the surviving fragments of a fascinating career that has hopped between pop iconography and serious urbanism, oftentimes both at once. The book offers a deep dive into the designer’s sketchbooks, along with a host of archive imagery revisiting some of the best-known projects from the SITE portfolio.
Fittingly, many of these relate to the work undertaken for the now defunct catalogue store Best Products Company, Inc. Set up by Sydney and Frances Lewis in the late 1950s, Best Products was that rare retailer that managed to parlay the artistic eye of its founders into commercial success. One of the Lewises’ big moves was to employ SITE to shape nine of their big-box stores, deploying a very literal take on the building-as-billboard aesthetic by deconstructing, twisting, tilting and expanding the building envelopes to make them stand out amidst the dreariness of suburban sprawl.
The book includes many of these now iconic projects, from the apparently crumbling ‘Indeterminate Façade’ in Houston, to the ‘Notch’ in Sacramento, with a sliding, fragmented corner that opened up to provide the entrance. The only surviving Best store is the ‘Forest Building’ in Richmond, Virginia, now a church. With a stand of trees set behind a false façade, the building gave the impression of a long-abandoned structure.
Real life definitely caught up with the SITE style but never with the artistic flair and imagination that Wines brought to these superficially prosaic structures. The book includes over 400 images and sketches of the majority of SITE’s portfolio of around 100 completed works, which extended to pavilions, interiors and public art installations such as the Ghost Parking Lot in Hamden, Connecticut, a group of tarmac-swathed vehicles growing – or melting – out of the infrastructure. Wines also collaborated with the late Virgil Abloh on stores for Off-White.
Now in his 1990s, Wines continues to be an advocate for the environment and the handmade, viewing drawing as an essential tool for making human connections with spaces. Edited by architectural historian Phillip Denny, an editor as well as an educator at Harvard and Pratt Institute, the monograph chronicles a never-ending fascination with architecture's relationship to nature. The Best stores might have had all the publicity, but What Else Could It Mean? offers so much to those seeking out new ways of engaging with public space.
What Else Could It Mean? Drawings and writings by James Wines & SITE, edited by Phillip Denny, Skira, £ 50 / $ 65 / € 60, Skira-Arte.com, @Skira_Arte