The Bricks Come Tumbling Down

By Wolf Von Eckardt

James Wines brings his "de-architecture" to academe

A leading architectural historian calls his work "frivolous in the highest degree." A design educator says he "has the energy and enthusiasm to make the dust fly." To architecture students, he is both an idol and an idol smasher. James Wines, 51, seems to be America's only truly avant-garde architectural designer at a time when the established avant-garde--or the avant-garde establishment--has lost its way. Many eyebrows were raised, therefore, when Wines was appointed to take over this fall as chairman of the environmental and interior design department at the Parsons School of Design in New York City. Critic Ralph Caplan may be understating the case when he says, "Wines' appointment will bring some excitement to Parsons."

Excitement is needed. In the 1960s design students tended to get too high on social "relevance," as they called it, to learn much. Now social irrelevance is fashionable; schools tend to condone a lazy hero worship of famous designers instead of requiring students to think and create on their own. Parsons, one of the best and largest schools of fashion, graphic, interior and product design, with a New York enrollment of 6,700 and branches in Los Angeles and Paris, is no exception.

Wines brings to his new assignment a flair that disturbs some, amuses others and fascinates nearly everyone. He never received formal architectural training but studied art and art history at Syracuse University and thereafter embarked on a successful career as an abstract sculptor. In 1968, while casting bronze sculpture at a foundry in Long Island City, N.Y., he met Alison Sky, an experimental sculptor and poet. Two years later, with Photographer-Writer Michelle Stone, they launched a design firm called SITE, an acronym for "sculpture in the environment."

"We agreed that art and architecture had lost contact with people," said Wines in SITE's New York office shortly after his appointment to Parsons. Said Sky: "We wanted to create art that relates to its surroundings, to the people who live with it." Added Wines: "We looked at old buildings in Italy and found that they tell us something--about life, mystery, religion. Modern buildings have lost all meaning. We have to bring art back into architecture, not as decoration . . ." Sky finished the thought with their byword: ". . . but as sculpture in the environment."

SITE at first made paper waves. It flooded art and architecture schools with publications expounding the Wines-Sky message and with exhibits showing unbuilt projects, mostly of buildings blending, melting, seemingly dissolving into their surroundings. The word "de-architecture" was often used. Dadaist Marcel Duchamp's name was frequently cited as an inspiration.

SITE's first real commission was the renovation of a Best Products Co. showroom in Richmond in 1971. Best Products is the largest U.S. catalogue showroom merchandiser, with a network of sales outlets that are essentially windowless brick boxes. In Richmond, SITE added a new fac,ade that incongruously and dramatically seemed to be peeling off the box.

Without repeating itself, the SITE team subsequently designed equally startling Best Products showrooms all over suburbia. Outside Houston, their building seems to be collapsing, a cascade of brick tumbling onto the front entrance. Near Miami, the Best Products showroom fac,ade seems ripped to pieces, and the fragments are surrealistically placed in front of one another like stage wings. There is a ten-foot space between each of the freestanding elements: doorways, a canopy over the sidewalk, a stripped, fac,adeless structure. And in Richmond a second showroom is built in segments amid a stand of trees, giving the impression that the surrounding forest is invading the building.

Such designs succeed in part by playing upon our fascination with romantic decay. We travel far to admire the remnants of past civilizations. Western art abounds with paintings of ruins, and, in 18th century gardens, architects actually built them. SITE's buildings also mock the self-righteous vacuity of modern suburban architecture. "Hell, we are all scared of technology and what it will do to us," says Wines. An unsettling view of what Wines calls "the American mobilized experience" is offered in the firm's Ghost Parking Lot at the Hamden Plaza shopping center in Hamden, Conn.: a row of 20 automobiles submerged to varying depths under a layer of asphalt.

Critics, particularly in Europe, began to see Wines as the only American architect to cast a plague on both houses of contemporary design, those of orthodox modernism and eclectic postmodernism. But the notion lingered that the inventive mockery of his designs for Best Products was relatively easy on a shopping strip, where anything goes. How would SITE perform in the city?

Partial returns are now in with two new projects. "HighRise of Homes" exists so far only as an exhibit for art galleries, yet Wines insists that it is commercially and structurally feasible. The project is an attempt to resolve the basic conflict of urban America: people want to live close together in order to enjoy the cultural and commercial benefits of high residential concentration and to reduce urban sprawl and the cost of commuting. But they also want single-family houses with architectural diversity and some private greenery around them. Wines would take these separate homes, yards and all, and stick them into eight-to ten-story-high steel-and-concrete frameworks to create "plots in the sky."

The second venture, the PAZ project, will soon start construction in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. It is a remodeling of a 1904 Y.M.C.A. building now owned by a Hasidic Jewish developer. The building will serve various commercial purposes, including housing a kosher restaurant, but it will also have a roof garden and spaces for religious festivities. As Wines designed it, PAZ (the name comes from the initials of the three principals in the development company) will resemble a ruined brick shell brought to life by a new glass enclosure. Two existing ornate portals will be replicated to provide four entrances, an allusion to the house of the patriarch Abraham as described in rabbinic writings. Explains Wines: "The design symbolizes the blend of cultures as well as the contrasts of decay and renewal that seem to be evident in Williamsburg."

Wines' sensitivity to various cultures and styles is what saves his work from being mere stunts or jokes. Yet he never holds back from undermining or dismantling any tradition in order to find a fresh way to connect architecture with people. Says he: "Nowadays all architects want to be humanists. Some believe forgotten historic trappings can make their buildings human. I am trying to do it with something new, with images of our time that everyone understands."

--By Wolf Von Eckardt This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.