vPLEASE NOTE: The image periodically goes all white in this video, though not for long. The audio is clear throughout.
After reciting over-the-top negative comments on SITE, Inc.’s work James Wines offers a defense and explanation of his firm based on a personal reading of architectural history. He identifies the Renaissance as the moment when iconography detached itself from buildings, culminating in the modernist ideal of the building as abstract form. Wines discusses structuralism, rationalism, and postmodernism as valid but incomplete critiques of modernism and formalism. Wines characterizes SITE, Inc.’s work as inherited typologies invested with new meanings. He discusses several showrooms for Best Products, including Houston (1975), Sacramento (1977), Towson, Maryland (1978), an unbuilt project for Los Angeles (1976) and Ashland, Virginia (1979). Wines also discusses projects for other clients, including the Ghost Parking Lot (1978) and the facade for Camera Barn (1978).
