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19

On SITE

Modern art, born to rebel, chafes at the boundaries of its site. In the name of originality, out go easel painting, representation, bourgeois taste, the museum, the gallery system, the art academies, the anxieties of influence, Oedipus, the object. Trotskyesque, the avant-garde aspires to its own permanence. The sites and sources of innovation float. Whether embracing social revolution or simply revolutionary manners; the technical innovations of video, photography, or computing; the coalescence of abstraction; the arrogation to an “expanded field” of disciplines across such traditional boundaries as architecture and landscape; or the willful reductionism of minimalism, modern art has thrived on its apparent flouting of recent convention. The cult of the new persists.

In his prescient De-Architecture of 1987, James Wines points out a fundamental contradiction in this history: the disproportion between the revolution in artistic practice and any actual social change in the societies parent to this imaginative innovation. It’s an observation that stems from both a particular moment in the life of art and a particular moment in Wines’s own career, a crisis in meaning. Wines began as a sculptor, co-generationalist to minimalists like Judd and Serra and to more environmentally attuned figures like Heizer, de Maria, and Christo. His own sculptural work—powerfully shaped by a sense of fecundity and historicity gained during formative years in Italy—developed along strong tectonic lines, assimilating place to a powerful artistic autonomy. Little worlds.

Wines’s commitment to the public nature of his work flows from this investigation of the meaning of the context of site. The dilemma of embodiment—both literally and conceptually—was crucial to someone who sought a practice infused by politics, and Wines’s project rapidly took a critical turn. In this, he shared an emotional, if not formal, sensibility with the quasi-political interventions of Gordon Matta-Clark, Alan Kaprow and Dennis Oppenheim. Each of these artists begged the question of participation both by relocating the spatial and social site of art and by the explicit content of their work, whether it took the form of cheerfully subversive “happenings” or cautionary propaganda.

By moving out into the space of public life, by provoking reactions that exceeded the bounds of conventional ideas of the beautiful, and by scaling up, these artists quickly hit the edge of architecture. Architecture, after all, is historically the discipline that has combined artistic principles—style, composition—with the deliberate framing of social life. The characteristic hubris of the architect has long lain in the assumption that architecture—through its propagation of forms and spaces—actually invents social exchange by elaborating its forms and rituals.

Although this has led to much of the blithely disengaged polemic that Wines so articulately denounces, there is an element of truth in architecture’s claim. Certainly, its power to oppress is brutally clear. Wines’s own critique of architectural modernism and its craven universalism—most grossly in the thread running from Le Corbusier to Pruitt-Igoe—hammers a well-battered nail on the head. But Wines’s muse has a mellower vibe, relishing architecture’s power to please. Italy is surely the model, especially the way in which the architecture of its townscape provides rich and varied settings for both communal and private satisfaction. Up against this bivalence, Wines rapidly transferred a relatively traditional sculptural practice to building.

The fervent sixties and seventies were a backdrop. While no progressive doubted art’s oppositional duty, there was much ferment about its expressive location and styles of relevance. The forms of the counterculture—happenings, squattings, demonstrations, Woodstocks, merry travels, and rural idylls—provided exuberant experiences but somewhat baroque visuals, the first real postmodern system of signification. Although stopping short of psychedelic, Wines’s taste had surely been liberated, swayed by the unabashed hedonism of youth culture and by its desire to link art and life.

The “sixties” was a genuine period of popular creation, and the birth of a distinct critical practice. The art world was both stimulated and incapacitated by the outpouring, responses dividing along generational lines. The slightly older cohort—Wines’s—was deep in the minimal. This might be seen as a critique of the effulgent excesses of the consumer society against which so many were in revolt. But minimalism was a dead end—further domestication of a movement with a long pedigree and a closet of grim outcomes, especially for architecture. The minimal represented nothing left to lose . . . or to do.

Minimalism’s cultic purification dovetailed with that of functionalism and its worship of the idea of an asymptotic fit of form and use. The architectural reading of this ideal, the existenzminimum of modernity’s universal worker-subject, extended this one-size-fits-all fantasy of form reduced to a core of pith, a vision that turned out to be a nightmare, penetential both socially and expressively. Artistic minimalism was a last gasp at recovering the aesthetic vitality of the sparse branch of modernism, stripping it of the social meaning that informed it in the first place, retaining only a whiff of the anti-bourgeois origins of modernism’s rebellion against the over-stuffed visual culture of the Victorian and Edwardian ages. A million dollars for a plywood box.

What not to do was clear. The logic of the turn to architecture was clear. The logic of rebellion against pure formalism was clear. The logic of seeking sites for the reattachment of politics to form was clear. The logic of invention was clear. What was opaque was precisely what to do, what language to embrace, and what program to champion. Certainly, it had to begin with collectivity. In a declarative and optimistic act, Wines and his partner Allison Skye, with Michelle Stone and Josh Weinstein, founded SITE—“sculpture in the environment”—proclaiming their desire to unify ideas of form and place.

The architectural climate at this moment was particularly preoccupied with issues of symbolic meaning, of the expressivity of building. The seminal text was Robert Venturi’s “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture” of 1967, a work itself rife with contradiction. On the one hand, its l’art pour l’art defense of the prosody of architecture was gratifyingly antithetical to the devolutionary functionalism that still served as mainline architecture’s threadbare theoretical cover. On the other, though, the politics was not entirely clear. Although Venturi’s “messy vitality” in many ways reflected the urbanistic argument of Jane Jacobs—whose The Death and Life of Great American Cities was the crucial document in the critique of modernist urbanism. But Venturi’s ardent formalism was also a cop-out, a distraction from the more urgent issues abroad in the streets (and the jungles).

Whatever Venturi’s intent, the effect of the publication was to sanction the various historicist practices rapidly subsumed under the category of “postmodernism.” America was suddenly awash in pediments and gables, not simply polluting architecture but also providing the visual and conceptual harbinger of the so-called “new urbanism,” with its more explicit politics of form and function. The continuing invocation of small-town forms as a medium of political speech by the new urbanists infects the idea of content with a Disneyesque fantasy of over-determination, stifling invention by camouflaging the same old repressions with picturesque décor.

SITE’s architectural beginnings were rich with modernism’s own house style of protest: surrealism. The minimalist hegemon was assailed by its naughty discontents, who challenged the dour prescriptions of high modernism’s Cartesianism with excess, humor, and irrationality. Because surrealism was funny, its relation to the canon had to be critical, and SITE used wit to both withering and beautiful effect. The Ghost Parking Lot (itself now under threat) of 1978 was a typically ingenious salvo—a vatic commentary, a prospective archaeology of internal combustion and its suburban spatial invention, and a place of play and assembly. Very much in the mood of Ant Farm’s iconic Cadillac Ranch, the Ghost Parking Lot was a critical monument of immediate and transcendent accessibility, part of a group of projects—including the 1976 Parking Lot Showroom and the fabulous Highway 86 in Vancouver.

This research received an enormous boost from the appearance of Sidney and Frances Lewis, whose patronage allowed SITE to move explicitly into architectural territory. Owners of “Best Products,” a chain of suburban department stores, and legendary art patrons, the Lewises engaged SITE to rethink the appearance of their emporia, up to that point just white brick big-boxes, sitting behind seas of parked cars. The commission was seminal, and SITE’s response amazing, collapsing critique, whimsy, and identity with cool aplomb. The well-known results, which riff the most fundamental qualities of building—stability, gravitation, porosity, autonomy—are among the most indelible passages in the architecture of the late twentieth century.

Wines’s research, from the start, has been explicitly engaged with questions of meaning and communication, and his “branding” of the Best stores is distinguished precisely by its legibility in all semiotic registers. Given the populism of Wines’s concerns, the question of visual accessibility is both crucial and intrinsic. SITE’s visual affect has always been broad, neither fey nor obscure in the historicist manner: an acerbic critique of the learned ironies of American postmodernism. Although they are clearly instances of Venturi’s “decorated shed,” the Best projects pose ticklish questions for the shed through a system of meaning that transcends appliqué to interrogate both the desires and strictures of the shed itself, illuminating the unconscious of the architecture of consumption.

The Best Products stores also provide a bridge to what has become the most important thematic of SITE’s production: the engagement with issues of the environment and the question of “green” architecture. In designs that morph facades into terraria, that layer built and green elements, that challenge the culture of the dual categorization of architecture and landscape, SITE investigates the forms available to the operations of creating a blending of elements long bifurcated. To be sure, the immediate motives for this early work were symbolic, even decorative, but the message was nonetheless clear: the artificial distinction between architecture and its environment had to go.

Here the work hearkens back to Wines’s beloved touchstone for successful public art, the Trevi Fountain in Rome. Surrealist avant la lettre, Trevi depicts an architectural reversal in which the ashlar of masonry is transformed into the (carefully simulated) ruggedness of a natural outcropping, which itself morphs into statuary. These meanings are instrumental in creating place, not in the sense that they are intrinsic to the function of gathering and refreshment, but inasmuch as they saturate the experience with the artistic, adding another layer of meaning rather than—like functionalism or minimalism—attempting to reduce all meanings to a singularity.

As a political artist, Wines quickly recognized that the dimension of argument—however artistic—was insufficient for an architecture of real aspiration that works at levels beyond simple signification. This is what distinguishes architecture: its purposive construction and its idea of service to humans is embodied, not abstracted. Here was a territory largely abandoned by the mainstream, whose formalisms and patterns of resource consumption grew increasingly empty and dangerous against the backdrop of a depleted environment in a condition of genuine crisis. For terraphiliacs, architecture had found a place to serve.

SITE emerged from a combination of taste, research, precedent, and urgency to become pioneers of planetary architecture. But there’s an important distinction to be made between this globalism of environmental universalism and both its predecessor, the “international” style, and the more flexible multinational corporate stylings of today. For all the extravagance of its political claims, modernist architecture sought to generalize form as the road to political revolution. The prismatic austerities of high modernism were the projection of a very particular fantasy of egalitarianism; a style of equality that today stands in disrepute, displaced by the deeper determinations of difference. Multinationalism avers its respect for locality, but the respect is fraudulent: the Singapore Sling in the frequent-traveler lounge at Changi.

There is an architectural universal and, as SITE’s work clearly suggests, it is based in the body. Rejecting the arguments of the “post-humanist” delirium of the virtual, SITE continues to reclaim the fundamentals of both art and use. In projects like the Avenue 5 “Green Wall” at the Seville exposition, for example, SITE employs its tools with rigor and mystery. Both organizational and tectonic, the wall attenuates one of architecture’s fundamental constituents. It is also, symbolically and literally, a house for nature, the creation of a congenial space for plant-life, wrested artificially from an unsupportive environment and thus a means of communicating—via this inversion—a message about human agency and responsibility in the invention of the “natural” environment. Finally, it is an armature for mist pipes and therefore a comfort to the human bodies circulating in the torrid and artificial environment of the world’s fair.

One of the enduring fascinations of modernist architecture is its idea of the free flow of space, the desire that the outdoors be continuous with the in. But, in virtually every classic iteration of the principle—from Aalto to Mies—the continuity is purely visual, an invisible membrane invariably enforcing the barrier between natural and architectural. SITE works hard to make that barrier obscure, to create a third way, “a fusion of buildings and environmental awareness as the raw material for a new and relevant iconography.” This idea of an iconographic agenda for architecture, however, is deeper than representation, and provides a fulcrum for both expressing and creating architectures of sustainability, a medium of internal critique exposing building to the test of its own represented aims.

SITE’s most recent work continues the project of blurring the distinction between architecture and environment, both technically and expressively. Certain motifs recur. The conceit of topography has long been an important element in SITE’s expressive palette, visible in works ranging from the Sunset Boulevard project in Hollywood to the Shinwa Resort in Kisokoma-Kogen, Japan, from the Trawsfynydd Communication Center in Wales to the Saudi Arabian National Museum in Riyadh. Derived from the fascinating lamination of topographic models, these buildings are conceptually poised between construction and landscape, an artificial element supporting natural growth. Keenly aware of his own prehistory, Wines celebrates the groundedness in place that has been a thematic in architecture from the Egyptians to the Greeks to the Anasazi, and the idea that building not impede the flow of nature appears in project after project by SITE.

This stacked topography also appears—rotated through 90 degrees—in a series of striped or banded projects. The World Ecology Pavilion in Seville actually combines both horizontal and vertical laminar styles in a series of parallel topographic slices. The Windsor Waterfront Park takes this strategy one step further by creating a series of topographic piers, alternating bands of landscape and water, a move multiplied in the contemporaneous Four Continents Bridge, in Hiroshima. The most elaborated banding-building to date is the unrealized Museum of Islamic Arts in Doha, Qatar, in which a series of undulating laminations evokes the striated dunescape of the Arabian desert.

The Doha museum has another of SITE’s signatures, the use of simple plan geometry as the medium for registering the dissolution of architecture into landscape. Here, the orthogonal system set up by the parallel walls of the building emerges in the landscape as a grid that organizes a garden which begins to wiggle and loosen as it approaches the edge of the site, lapsing finally into pure landscape. The same recurs in the Dresden Garden project and in the first full-formed version of the scheme, the civic center for Le Puy-en-Velay, France. In this work, the grid is the medium of translation between a group of historic buildings and a surrounding terraced topography, decreasing the degree of the artificial as the force of the project wanes over distance.

This technique of the graded wash between building and landscape parallels James Wines’s own beautiful pen-and-wash delineations, a technique that also depends on the artful blur and controlled transition. This dissolve—rendered either as cut or fade-out—works both as blur and as seam. At the Perpetual Savings and Loan Bank of 1980, a “traditional” stone bank building changes into a greenhouse along a diagonal seam. At the San Leandro Best of 1983 and Frankfurt Museum of 1984, the joint between masonry and glass is created by a rotation in plan, one building type turning into or passing through the other, producing forms that are suave, rich, and surprising.

SITE delivers its message by merging cultural and natural landscapes to both advertise and enable a sustainable future for the earth. The embedded critique is not simply of an architecture that resists its environmental duty, but of one that fails to investigate and invent the richness of sustainability’s formal palette. SITE’s work is not shy about its individuality as art, re-infusing architecture with the relevance of both difference and co-determination, seducing us into a logical future.

2002