SITE

In 1970 in New York,  James Wines, along with Allison Sky, Michelle Stone and Joshua Weinstein, founded the inter-disciplinary group Sculpture in the Environment (SITE) that aimed to desecrate the contemporary myths of consumer society through a process of ‘de-architecture’, that is to say, a process that de-structuralized the concept of architecture by means of contamination with other visual arts, particularly sculpture. After studying art and art history and graduating from Syracuse University, Wines worked more as a sculptor than as an architect until about the end of the 1960s, when he began creating models (Landsite Sculptures, 1968-69) that strove to replace the traditional concept of sculpture in favor of the idea of an object built as a part of an overall context. These proposals, made of steel on a ‘rocky’ terrain, were, on a conceptual level, already veritable architectural prototypes. Within SITE, Wines dedicated himself to the conceptual and creative definition of the projects, also carrying out an intense activity as a critic, writing articles and essays for magazines in the USA, Europe and Japan. His book De-Architecture (1987) proved fundamental in reiterating and spreading the concept of architecture integrated with art, technology and nature and at the same time assimilated within its context.  Examples of this idea are represented by the projects realized by SITE for the BEST store chain, among which Peeling Project (1972), Indeterminate Facade (1975), Best Parking Lot (1976), Inside/Outside Building (1984) in which typical ‘non-sites’ were used to express the idea of architecture, and particularly to proclaim its possible disappearance in terms of a formal language, in favor of improved integration with the surrounding context. The projects that followed increasingly denounced the desire for full integration between architecture and the natural environment, while at the same time Wines intensified his theoretical research on the theme of the relationship between architecture and nature, culminating in the thorough analysis presented in Green Architecture (2000).