During his 10 years working as a sculptor in Italy, James Wines gained an appreciation for what he described as “the intrinsic blending of art, architecture, communicative iconography, and public space.”He led a prolific career as an artist in the 1950s and 1960s, exhibiting his sculptural work in galleries and corporate plazas before turning toward architecture and environmental design. Explaining his disillusionment with the practice of sculpture, he later wrote, “I was tired of the exhibition context. It wasn’t public enough.”
After relocating to New York, Wines began to develop the conceptual basis for a design practice that would “focus on materially sensible and structurally uncomplicated buildings, shaped by social, psychological, and site-specific ideas drawn from the surrounding environment.” In 1970, alongside collaborators Alison Sky, Emilio Sousa, and Michelle Stone, he established SITE—originally an acronym for Sculpture in the Environment. SITE’s founders bemoaned the dominance of Industrial Age notions of architecture as a purely functionalist pursuit, aiming instead to reconfigure buildings as sources of information and commentary on their physical contexts. For Wines, assembling new meanings from existing architectural forms was a more challenging pursuit than creating new forms altogether.
As Founder and President of SITE, James Wines, is the winner of twenty-five art and architecture awards – including the 2013 National Design Award for Lifetime Achievement, 2011 ANCE International Architect Award (Italy) and 1995 Chrysler Award for Design Innovation. His projects for SITE have been the subject of twenty-one monographic books and honored by five retrospective exhibitions in the USA, Europe and Japan. His drawings are in the collections of thirty-five museums, including the Museum of Modern Art NY, Victoria & Albert Museum London and Centre Pompidou Paris. Wines is the author of seven books and a Professor of Architecture at Penn State University.
