A friend of mine sent me these great vintage videos of James Wines office SITE and their Best Products Co. Showrooms designs and seminal big box retail projects of the 70’s and 80s’. Wines was a proponent of surrealist humor in a suburban context -SITE was an acronym for Sculpture In The Environment; the projects are conceptually groundbreaking and have a great sense of humor.

“SITE’s first real commission was the renovation of a Best Products Co. showroom in Richmond in 1971. Best Products is the largest U.S. catalogue showroom merchandiser, with a network of sales outlets that are essentially windowless brick boxes. In Richmond, SITE added a new façade that incongruously and dramatically seemed to be peeling off the box.

Without repeating itself, the SITE team subsequently designed equally startling Best Products showrooms all over suburbia. Outside Houston, their building seems to be collapsing, a cascade of brick tumbling onto the front entrance. Near Miami, the Best Products showroom façade seems ripped to pieces, and the fragments are surrealistically placed in front of one another like stage wings. There is a ten-foot space between each of the freestanding elements: doorways, a canopy over the sidewalk, a stripped, façadeless structure. And in Richmond a second showroom is built in segments amid a stand of trees, giving the impression that the surrounding forest is invading the building.”

Excerpt from Time

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

For more on the current condition of Big Box retail and some interesting adaptive reuse of the building type checkout  ‘Big Box Reuse‘.

via Bryant Yeh, 4 February 2009 8:30am | |