James Wines

James Wines (born 1932) is an American artist and architect associated with environmental design. Wines is founder and president of SITE, a New York City-based architecture and environmental arts organization chartered in 1970. His multi-disciplinary practice focuses on the design of buildings, public spaces, environmental art works, landscape designs, master plans, interiors, and product design. The main focus of his design work is on green issues and the integration of buildings with their surrounding contexts.

Wines is currently a professor of architecture at Penn State University. In addition to critical writing, he has lectured in fifty-two countries on green topics since 1969. In 1987, his book De-Architecture was released by Rizzoli International Publications. There have been twenty two monographic books museum catalogues have published his drawings, models, and built works for SITE.

Wines explicitly expresses his own "concern for the Earth," having written at length on new modes of architecture, design, and planning: The [20th] century began with architects being inspired by an emerging age of industry and technology. Everybody wanted to believe a building could somehow function like a combustion engine. As an inspirational force in 1910, one can understand it. But as a continuing inspiration in our post-industrial world, or our new world of information and ecology, it doesn't make any sense. --from the film Ecological Design: Inventing the Future

Background and career James Wines graduated from Syracuse University in 1956. He became a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome that year and was bestowed a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962. He then began his career as a sculptor and graphic designer, exhibiting with the Otto Gerson Gallery (subsequently Marlborough Gallery) in New York.

Wines’ corporate clients include Swatch, MCA Universal, MTV, Nickelodeon, Williwear, Isuzu, Disney, Costa Coffee, Carrabba's Restaurants, Saporiti Italia, Brinker International, Allsteel, Ranger Italia, Reliance Energy Corporation, and Denny's. Among municipal clients, he has worked for the cities of Hiroshima, Yokohama, Toyama, Seville, Vienna, Vancouver, Le Puy en Velay, Chattanooga, and New York City. His original drawings for these projects have graced the covers of dozens of international design magazines.

As an educator, Wines originally held adjunct positions at the New School for Social Research (1963–65) and a number of other institutions. In 1974, he taught as an Associate Professor of Fine Art in the New York University Department of Art and Arts Professions. This was followed by visiting professorships at Dartmouth College, the University of Wisconsin, New Jersey School of Architecture, and Cooper Union Design Center. He was chair of the Environmental Design department at Parsons School of Design from 1984 to 1990. After teaching at Domus Academy in Italy and at the University of Oklahoma, he became a professor of architecture at Pennsylvania State University in 1999. Wines has built a legacy of mentoring emerging art talent, including noted designer, Alex Donahue.

Wines' daughter Suzan is also an architect and co-owns the firm I-Beam Design with fellow architect Azin Valy. Both Suzan and Azin are graduates of Cooper Union.

Philosophy on hand drawing

Wines strongly advocates hand drawing as a key to conceptual processes, alongside computer-aided tools. “For most architects graphic representation is notional, technical, or illustrative and mainly used as an analytical tool to record design intentions. I consider drawing more as a way of exploring the physical and psychological state of inclusion, suggesting that buildings can be fragmentary and ambiguous, as opposed to conventionally functional and determinate.”

Works

Best Products showrooms, including the Forest Building Grey Disc, the Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection (1968) Indeterminate Facade; Houston, Texas (1970) Tilt Show Room; Towson, Maryland (1978) Forest Building, Museum of Modern Art, New York City (1978) Terrarium Show Rooms, Ink (1979) Ghost Parking Lot; The Frankfurt Museum of Modern Art; Competition Entry, Frankfurt, Germany (1983) Highway 86; Vancouver, Canada (1985) Laurie Mallet House; New York City (1985) World Ecology Building; Seville, Spain (1990) Avenue Number Five; Seville, Spain (1992) Horoscope Ring, Toyama, Japan (1992) Aquatorium, Chattanooga, Tennessee (1993) Ross's Landing Park and Plaza; Chattanooga, Tennessee (1992) Unbuilt Proposal for Museum of Islamic Arts (1996) Chili's Grill and Bar, Arapaho Crossing, Colorado (1998) Carrabba's Italian Grill, Orlando, Florida (1998) Residence Antilia (unbuilt) (2003) Shake Shack kiosk at Madison Square Park, New York City (2004)

Awards

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum Lifetime Achievement Award, 2013 American Institute of Architects Award; SITE, Shake Shack Madison Square Park, 2010 Fulbright Distinguished Professor Grant, University of Toronto, 2004 Chrysler Award for Design Innovation, 1995 National Endowment for the Design Arts, Critical Writing on Architecture, 1992 Architectural Record, Award for Excellence, Residential Design; SITE, 1986 Interiors Magazine, Award for Showroom Design; SITE, 1985 National Sculpture Exhibition; Philadelphia Museum of Art; 1966 Pulitzer Prize, Award for Graphic Art; 1955