James Wines, American artist and architect associated with environmental design, is founder and president of SITE, an architecture and environmental arts organization chartered in 1970. In 1972 SITE was commissioned by BEST Products Company to design a series of nine ‘big box’ shopping centers. Since these retail structures are ubiquitous in the public domain, people’s reflex acceptance of their archetypal imagery has been used in each case to invert and change the meaning. Instead of approaching the BEST buildings as conventionally ‘designed’ architecture, they are treated as a ‘subject matter for art’ and a source of visual commentary on the American commercial strip.
In the stores Wines designs for BEST, the “building has only undergone a very slight physical change, but a very powerful psychological one”. This willful ambiguity evokes the theories of Charles Jencks, or those of Robert Venturi and his concept of the decorated shed, for example, in which the façade is separated from the house, as is the case with the BEST stores. Wines also introduces the concepts of dissociation and fragmentation in his architecture. Influenced by Carl Jung’s texts on the logic of the dream, Wines calls upon the irrational and equivocal. He turns architecture into a “means for architectural criticism” drawing on imagery from advertising, sitcoms, rock music, junk culture, reflecting the heterogeneous nature of the context itself. “The context is the content” Wines writes.