Dear Vancouver architects and business owners, let’s re-visit the enlightened 1970s collaboration between the Best Products company, based in Virginia, and the artist-architect James Wines and his group SITE (Sculpture In The Environment). We could use some of their joint risk-taking and artistic innovation around here. What the videos below show evidence of, but don’t elaborate on, is the fact that the owners of the Best Products company were a highly educated, innovative, aesthetically adventurous family deeply interested in art. Quite apart from hiring James Wines, who is also a sculptor, and giving him an enormous amount of artistic freedom, over the years the Lewis family also amassed an amazing art collection by actually allowing artists to trade store goods for art. You can read about the Lewis family and Best Products here. In one of those funny mutual blog tag-team moments, a million monkeys typing responded to my previous post on James Wines and SITE and added this excellent little video on James Wines, which I’d never seen before, as well as the interesting fact that SITE also produced “Highway 86″ in Vancouver’s 1986 World’s Fair, which for some reason I didn’t know either. Watch the rest of the video here: Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4. Thanks for the videos and the photo of Highway 86, millionmonkeys.
I first saw these amazing buildings, almost all of which have now either had their facades removed or have actually been demolished, in the November 2007 issue of Wallpaper. The BEST Products Company of Richmond, Virginia commissioned architect James Wines’ SITE (Sculpture In The Environment) to build nine commercial buildings for them in the 1970s and early 80s. BEST was founded and owned by the Lewises, a Virginia family with an interest in art and design. BEST stores were famous for their willingness to trade store merchandise for art and as a result the company, as well as the Lewises, gathered a significant collection of 20th century art. Much of the Lewis Collection can be seen at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. (See Wikipedia for a more detailed story.) The building above has supposedly appeared in more books on 20th century architecture than photographs of any other modern structure. Some interesting videos about the Best buildings are here. And Part 2 of this blog post is here.
This is a long, messy, eclectic photo essay about the strange, hybrid, and surprisingly impure histories of objects and buildings. It is skewed toward the ancient, the modern, the space-age, the 1960s and the 1970s, the adventurous, the unexpected, the ecological, the utopian and the anti-utopian, the unstuffy and the unstaid, design as making-do, the real, the lived in, and mixes of all kinds. Since design isn't divorced from other things, it's also about art, social issues, urban and community planning, technology, philosophy and anything else that intersects with design, which means everything. "ouno" is a name in both Finnish and Japanese, it's the same upside-down as right-side-up, it refers to both zeros and ones, and it is pronounced uno. My name is Lindsay and I'm open to your complaints, disagreement or general crankiness. Free free to comment or email. This is an anti-intellectualism-free zone and around here we don't try to dampen critique by calling it negativity or whining. We call it thought!
