In 1988 or '89 when James Wines was on the lecture circuit he made a stop in Anchorage and spoke at an AIA Alaska Chapter event that was part of a series on collaboration between artists and architects. After his talk, where the audience gathered in the Museum theater lobby, I went up to Wines, told him my name and said something like, you guys and your work are SO GREAT! [Or something else equally dorky -- I forget exactly what it was.]
"Well, thank you! Are you an artist or an architect?"
"Kind of, both but yet neither."
"Hmmm -- sounds as if you are on the right track!"
This was like meeting a childhood idol! I was totally enthralled.
In the Summer of 1984 I started working for Livingston Slone. On the table in the library was a recent issue of Architectural Record, with a feature story on SITE and focusing on the Best Products stores. Immersing myself in the words, philosophy and visual imagery, I was transformed, personally and professionally forever. This is what kept me in the game mentally at architectural firms [up until then, I wasn't too sure about it] and informed and influenced everything I would do in the ensuing years.
Beginning in the '80s and continuing unabated today, the retail and commercial design world has lived under a push for standardization. Every store, everyplace in the country [or U.S.-controlled base in another country] should offer a matching experience. Familiarity as currency. Any building type or larger development [apartment block; corporate office campus; shopping mall; neighborhood mixed use commercial center] was subject to a similar dictum -- novelty and individuality were discouraged, blunted or prohibited outright. In retail, the prevailing style gravitated toward a clunky, utilitarian layout festooned with a grab bag of historical elements, often comically over-scaled [25 foot high letters hovering over a colonnade of 10 foot square stone covered porch columns] and deployed with varying degrees of success depending on context.
The Best projects represent the last gasp of Architectural creativity allowed to flower in a garden variety commercial retail realm. The projects had all of the ingredients somebody like me, a child of the 1960s raised in an era of change would be attracted to: a mocking derision of mainstream dogma; a healthy skepticism of guiding principles of big business; an "in your face", ribald, stripped-down aesthetic that on one hand seemed like a cheap gimmick after a jaw-dropping, dumbfounded reaction [WTF am I looking at?] and on the other got deep into our collective psyche and notions of order and chaos.
In the late 1980s Anchorage lecture, Wines did not disappoint, showing a college project by an anonymous Architecture Dept. student that, in one building study model showed almost every known modern and post-modern design cliche. Talking about the designs and ideas for Best, Wines' pithy quote was something like, we take the fact that the client is a cheapskate and doesn't want to spend much more than the bare minimum on the project, and try incorporate that into the aesthetic of the building. The result is the Houston area Best store, with crumbling brick facade; the one with the front facade detached and moved forward, with what looks like a dense native boreal forest between; and the Tilt version in MD, with the front brick facade partially disengaged/elevated and leaning against the rest of the building mass.
The greatest by far Best design for me was the Parking Lot Building, an unbuilt design wherein the asphalt pavement, complete with striping, traffic aisles and light poles, rumples [in a way that reminds me of a living room rug that needs to be flattened out and straightened] up over the building volume, the front and back facades peeking out from underneath. Nothing I've seen says more about the dystopia we have created by mandating unbridled sprawl development in all but a few places -- and the bland uniformity that approach entails.
SITE has been an early adopter of green buildings, and ahead of other trends [re-embrace of Deconstructivism as an acceptable approach, for example]. At their most influential times they've been an important voice of dissent, that should come from establishment channels that have been strangely silent on these matters for years.
One can see evidence of SITE's influence all over. In Seattle, the downtown REI building [the entry to which is through a forested glen that also is located in the urban core and shadow of a freeway] seems like a logical extension of the Best Forest Building. And Steve Badanes and his collaborators who incubated the Fremont Troll concept must have been paying attention when SITE covered cars with asphalt a few years earlier.
The time is ripe for a big retailer to buck the trend of boring sameness and reinvigorate their brand by going a different way. Starbucks and a few others show an occasional flash of brilliance when they conduct adaptive restorations on older buildings or otherwise display a willingness to break away in some small gesture. Wouldn't it be great if Ikea, or Target or Costco took a flying design leap and took it upon themselves to foster a whole new design approach that brought back joyful, unexpected and even unsettling aspects?