CultureNOW - BEST Indeterminate Facade Building: SITE Architecture & Design (Sculpture in the Environment) and James Wines

BEST Indeterminate Facade Building

In response to the present age of information and ecology, SITE believes that a truly sustainable architecture for the future must provide an expanded definition of green design and a higher level of communication with the public. This refers to an integration of social, psychological, ecological, and contextual information as the basis for a new architectural language. Reflecting this creative approach, a number of SITE's recent works have been based on inspirational sources found in communications systems, the natural sciences, and energy conservation technology.

SITE is a New York City based, multi-disciplinary architecture and environmental arts organization, chartered in 1970 and presently located in the Wall Street area of Manhattan. The studio is internationally known for its contributions to "environmental thinking," as well as its site-specific projects integrating buildings with their surrounding environments. The purpose of SITE is to create architecture and public spaces that respond to social, psychological, cultural and ecological information.

During the early years, SITE was philosophically motivated by the societal and political revolutions of the late 1960's, as well as a questioning of the stylistic dominance of Modernist, Cubist, and Constructivist influences in architecture. In response to this critical climate, the studio advocated a total fusion of the arts - challenging those conventions that have traditionally separated visual art, buildings and landscape. Alternatively, SITE proposed an aesthetic approach where it would become difficult to determine where one art form begins and the other ends. The group's work today is not about architecture as an object sitting in the environment; but rather, it is more about integrating structure and context as a total fusion of elements, which can then be interpreted as the environment.

After the early 1990's, SITE became increasingly involved with green issues. More recently, the office has dedicated a greater proportion of time to environmental research - resulting in the book GREEN ARCHITECTURE (Taschen Verlag 2000) - and built projects that draw upon an expanded variety of contextual sources of ideas. In the interest of developing a new post-industrial architectural language, SITE believes that buildings and public spaces should move beyond Industrial Age traditions - inclusive of their conceptual, functional and aesthetic origins - in order to respond more effectively to the Twenty-first Century Age of Information and Ecology.

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Artist
James Wines

Architect
SITE Architecture & Design (Sculpture in the Environment)

Dates

Constructed, 1975

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Description

In 1972 SITE was commissioned by BEST Products Company to design a series of nine shopping center buildings. Since ‘big box’ retail structures are ubiquitous in the public domain, people’s reflex acceptance of their archetypal presence has been used to invert and change its meaning. Instead treating the BEST stores as conventionally ‘designed’ architecture, their rectangular profiles are used as a ‘subject matter for art’ and a source of visual commentary on the American commerci...

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Location

10765 KIngspoint Road
Houston, TX 77075
United States

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