SITE (Sculpture in the Environment)

Established 1968 and chartered in 1970; based in New York City
James Wines, cofounder, president, and creative director

SITE is a multidisciplinary architecture and environmental arts organization that aims to create architecture and public spaces through an integration of structure and context that responds to social, psychological, cultural, and ecological information. Reacting in its early years to modernism’s hegemony, SITE challenged traditional distinctions between visual art, architecture, and landscape, advocating instead a fusion that would make it difficult to determine where one art form ends and another begins. Exemplars of this approach were the nine showrooms it built between 1972 and 1984 for Best Products, an appliance and housewares catalogue showroom merchandiser and one of the country’s first suburban big box stores. These projects—the sole survivor of which is the Indeterminate Facade (Houston, 1975)—not only elided the boundary between art and architecture, but also achieved SITE’s polemical goal of bringing art out of the museum and into the public realm. Since the early 1990s, SITE has become increasingly engaged with sustainable architecture and environmental research. It believes that a truly sustainable architecture for the future must provide an expanded definition of green design and a higher level of communication with the public. Reflecting SITE’s integrative approach, recent works have been based on inspirational sources found in communications systems, the natural sciences, and energy conservation technology. SITE has been the author or subject of dozens of monographs, exhibition catalogues, and journal articles and was included in the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2002. James Wines has received some twenty-five art and design awards to date, including the 1995 Chrysler Award for Design Innovation and a Pulitzer Prize for graphics.