James Wines and SITE - Context as Content

摘要

Today, who still knows the office SITE? Unfortunately, only a few. SITE Stands for "Sculpture in the Environment" and was founded in New York in 1970 by the art-ists James Wines, Alison Sky and Michelle Stone. It was conceived as an "arts studio for innovative buildings, public Spaces, parks, interiors and product de-sign" that questioned the banality of the everyday US American world with its sprawling cities in a sustainable, con-text-related, and often ironical way, and attempted to reprogramme it to be more vital and greener. They sought to counter the severe rationality of architectural modernism with flowing spa-tial structures that seemed to blend insepar-ably with the landscape or the context of the place and that regularly jolted habitual ways of seeing. For the "Best Stores" supermarket chain they developed retail buildings intended to be more than just Containers: these were gently embedded in woods or former nursery gardens where they took up the topography. They were implanted in the unreal setting of suburbia like, for example, the Best Store in Houston from 1975, probably their most fa-mous building, which exudes the charm of a ruin in a landscaped park in a way that is both romantic and ironical. A magical retrospective at the Tchoban Foundation in Berlin is currently offering wide-rang-ing insights into the work of this group. Incom-prehensibly, the two female co-founders of SITE, who left after twenty years to follow their own path, are not mentioned. The show makes up for this with many almost unknown projects made after 1990 in the Far East, gener-ally situational transformations of public space and very "green" exhibition buildings that often play with their location and their func-tion in an ironical and complex way. This exhibition is enjoyable and deeply humanist. Re-peatedly it dares to think differently about the Status quo and to imagine new formations of landscape. James Wines can probably be de-scribed as one of the earliest "environmental architects". In a film he conveys his convictions in a highly entertaining manner while drawing and developing a project for Korea, in the pro-cess coining the catchy phrase: "Computers use algorithms, people use their fantasy".