All Over the Map. Michael Sorkin
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