CultureNOW - Ghost Parking Lot: SITE Architecture & Design (Sculpture in the Environment) and James Wines

Ghost Parking Lot

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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Artists
SITE Architecture & Design (Sculpture in the Environment), James Wines

Dates

Installed, 1978
Removed, 2003

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Description

Twenty automobiles are buried under asphalt at various graduated levels, from full exposure of the body contours to complete envelopment by the paving. Contrary to the prevalent use of ‘object art’ as a decorative accessory to buildings and public spaces, this fusion of normally mobile vehicles, engulfed by their environment, takes advantage of people’s subliminal response to the rituals of roadway merchandising and the fetishism of strip mall culture. Also, unlike public art conceived f...

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Location

2100 Dixwell Avenue
Hamden, CT 06514
United States

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