Building with Nature

This inaugural episode features landmark artist and architectural designer James Wines, a singular visionary in American architecture who has foregrounded ecology and the environment. Cofounder of SITE (Sculpture in the Environment), an environmental arts studio based in New York, Wines has focused on the creation of decades’ worth of fantastical drawings—a trove of ecological narratives that often run counter to mainstream, Western architectural discourses. Wines started out as a sculptor, and many of his projects are arguably sculptures on a building’s scale. In his iconic BEST department store buildings, we see a range of sculptural feats, from the “collapsing” facade of the building to piles of stacked bricks as unfinished physical deconstructions of a building “in process.” Wines’s architectural “ethos” involves designing buildings, landscapes, and public spaces based on how they connect and converse with their surroundings. For Wines, architecture is a process rather than an end product, and we must build with nature and our environment, as opposed to destroying it.