James Wines on Cohabitation, Trying to Do More With Less

This lecture by James Wines, founder of the architecture and environmental design studio SITE, traced the evolution of his practice and its ongoing critique of architectural formalism. Wines has spent his career challenging the assumption that architecture must be driven by new form-making. Instead, he advocates for inversion, intervention, and context as design strategies, arguing that architecture gains meaning through its relationship to the environment—social, material, and ecological.

Wines reflected on his early years as a sculptor in Italy, where he developed an appreciation for the integration of art, public space, and cultural commentary. Dissatisfied with the limitations of gallery work—“it wasn’t public enough,” he later wrote—he shifted toward architecture as a medium capable of broader societal engagement. In 1970, he co-founded SITE (Sculpture in the Environment) with Alison Sky, Emilio Sousa, and Michelle Stone, forming a practice dedicated to site-specific design and architectural critique.

Through projects like the iconic BEST Products Showrooms (1972–1980), Wines explored how minimal interventions could transform banal commercial structures into cultural provocations. The Forest Building split a big-box façade to make space for old-growth trees, while the Ghost Parking Lot (1978) in Connecticut submerged cars in asphalt, subverting suburban symbols of mobility and consumption. Conceptual works like Highrise of Homes (1981) proposed radical alternatives to urban housing by combining vertical density with vernacular individuality.

In the lecture, Wines spoke candidly about the urgent environmental crises facing contemporary architecture: unchecked urbanization, extreme material waste, and the moral consequences of industrialized design. He called for an “economy of means” and encouraged emerging designers to develop new paradigms grounded in responsibility, adaptive thinking, and small but meaningful interventions. Positioned at the intersection of art, ecology, and architecture, his message was both critical and optimistic: designers have a pivotal role in shaping the future—if they are willing to rethink the discipline’s priorities.