James Wines, a New York architect and environmental artist, has been on a mission of sorts. He believes that architecture needs to be liberated from itself. This act of liberation is expressed in many radical projects that he and his company, SITE (Sculpture In The Environment) realized in 11 countries. Wines is world famous for such projects as Ghost Parking Lot (Hamden, CO, 1977), Highrise of Homes (theoretical project, 1981), Highway 86 (Vancouver, Canada, 1986), Fondazione Pietro Rossini Pavilion (Briosco, Italy, 2008), and Off-White Showroom for Virgil Abloh (Ginza, Tokyo, 2021). The very essence of the architect’s work is expressed in his fascinating stores for BEST Products Company, the key focus of my conversation with the architect that took place over Zoom on August 10, 2022, following many of our in-person meetings.
The BEST Products Company, a chain of American catalog showroom retail stores, was founded by Sydney and Frances Lewis, prominent art collectors and major benefactors of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia. The couple had run their successful commercial empire for four decades until 1997. At its peak, the company maintained 169 showrooms in 23 states. The Lewises commissioned SITE to design about a dozen of their stores; nine were built:
Peeling Building (Richmond, VA, 1972)
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Indeterminate Façade (Houston, TX, 1974)
Tilt Building (Towson, MD, 1976)
Notch Building (Sacramento, CA, 1977)
BEST Anti-sign Building (Richmond, VA, 1978)
Cutler Ridge Showroom or “Jigsaw Puzzle” building (Miami, FL, 1979)
Rainforest Building (Hialeah, FL, 1979)
Forest Building (Richmond, VA, 1980)
Inside/Outside Building (Milwaukee, WI, 1984)
It is said that the Indeterminate Façade Building in suburban Houston appeared in more books on 20th-century architecture than photos of any other modern structure.
Unfortunately, out of nine built BEST stores only one, Forest Building in Richmond, Virginia, remains standing, and even that changed drastically. Nevertheless, these now demolished structures are ingrained in our collective memory. These buildings introduced and shocked the world with many of the architect’s revolutionary ideas. Their unorthodox facades quite literally displaced people’s expectations and assumptions about the nature of architecture, shopping, and suburbia. Wines turned his buildings into remarkable works of art that provoked conversations, questioning, amusement, as well as misunderstanding, and even protests.
The architect is a great provocateur whose unconventional work disjointed the idea of architecture as a style. His work changed the course of architecture by freeing it from all kinds of dogmas. SITE’s architecture provokes ideas of hybridization. James Wines treats architecture as a form of critique and a platform for continuous discourse. By the very act of placing art where people least expect to find it, he taught us how to be more observant, curious, and critical of our everyday environment. Wines brought a rebellious attitude to the profession and his efforts expanded architecture by making buildings more artistic, imaginative, process-oriented, open-ended, integrated with nature, and, of course, more fun to explore.
