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.

Things for your garden, from right to left: Roman column, menacing bird of prey statue fit for a military dictator, mass-produced standing stone with Chinese inscription, birdbath/fountain with peeing cupid and his parents, cartoon meteorite.

Acutally, this is neither a meteorite nor a fake. It’s a real, naturally occurring rock of some kind. Must be volcanic but I have no idea what it is. Does anyone?. It rusts so it must have iron in it, and it’s hard. If I had the room and the money, I’d buy it.

You could almost call these buildings archeotecture, or perhaps archeolitecture, because though all three were built recently, they look and feel profoundly archeological. All of them have the mute, mysterious quality of monumental ancient ruins and they produce – for me, anyway – that weird, quiet, prickling-the-back-of-the-neck sensation you sometimes get when viewing something impossibly old. The Ningbo Museum (at bottom) is actually an archeological museum, so it’s not surprising that it mimics an unearthed stone structure, but the other two buildings have no immediate connection to archeology: one is a house in Peru, the other an office in Spain. The building above is the Pachacamac House in Peru by Longhi Architects. The room in the third photo is the master bedroom. The house is a beautiful building, almost an earthwork, extremely sensitive to its environment, and one among many intelligently-thought-out buildings appearing lately in South America. 

The building above is the SGAE Central Office in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, by the Spanish architectural firm Ensamble Studio. “The great stone wall can be thought of as a monumental sculpture, constructed by the superposition and repetition of prehistoric orders adapted to a Renaissance broken composition. The Mondariz Grey stone facade components appear in one of their purest forms, as irregular ashlars of variable geometry and size, selected directly from the quarry overage, and ordered in permeable strips that manipulate the South light breaking it on the inside. This sculptural content causes the disintegration of the building as such, going beyond its mere symbolic and functional dimension…” 

Above, the Ningbo Historic Museum was designed by Wang Shu of Amateur Architecture Studio. Photos by Iwan Baan. 

Maybe these forms and materials – the simple monumentality, the stone – are a reaction against recent architectural glitz and excess, or maybe they’re the unconscious product of an increasingly apocalyptic environmental imagination that already imagines every building a ruin, or maybe it’s all just coincidence. I’m certain there must be earlier examples of this, but I can’t think of them at the moment. All three buildings were found on the superb archdaily.