James Wines

James Wines is the founder and president of the architecture and environmental arts studio SITE.

“There was nothing exotic about the house in any way. That’s about the only thing I can say about it, since SITE, my architectural practice, is very much involved with radical architecture. My parents didn’t even understand what I was doing when I started, in 1970. They thought I was crazy, but said, ‘Okay, let him do it.’

There were so many conventions in terms of house design, and furniture, and things my mother liked. And they all, in a sense, defined the American dream, the typical American family. As I grew up and became more restless as an artist and eventually an architect, to me there was something oppressive about that kind of environment, which I subsequently used as a point of incentive, kind of a springboard, to get out of it all. That’s how SITE happened. When I go back and look at the nature of my work, so much of it was inversions, or social criticism, or visual puns based on conventions.

In conventional furniture design, everything had a quasi-colonial, early American feeling to it. Those conventions are universal: Everybody knows what they look like. My house looked like all my schoolmates’ houses. And so the nature of that archetype was pervasive. It was in my whole early life and, as a way of living, it was reasonably comfortable, of course.

The only thing that bothered me was the aesthetic ambience in itself. There seemed to be no invention, no imagination. It was sort of an all-over unifying convention that then pervaded the neighborhood and the other people around me—and certainly my grandparents.

There was an interesting house—probably the most interesting house—a log cabin built in the Lake Huron area of the U.S.A. by my grandfather, which I stayed in as a child. It always fascinated me because it was from the log-cabin tradition of which I was not familiar. If I exercised any childhood curiosities, they were applied to this house.

Whereas with my own, real house, I almost never thought about it until later. At the time, I think I accepted its conventions because they were all I knew. I remember there was a hallway, and in the hallway, there was a big mirror hanging. It was one of those funny distorting mirrors, so you’d always see yourself kind of elongated. Then you would move to the living room, and there were sofas and chairs, but always with little articulations that were neo-American. So it wasn’t something that was, I would say, making a deep impression. The impression was convention, and my increasing awareness of it.

Every door handle, every artifact in the house, had this Sears, Roebuck look about it. So in doing objects, which I did later in life, I always thought of that origin, of that kind of conventional project. In fact, this new book that I’m working on—I guess it’ll be the last one on SITE’s work—is called What Else Could It Mean?

That’s a question I’ve asked my whole life: ‘What else could it mean?’ When I was more active, we had a large office of people. I came into the computer age: I learned the basics, but I never became a whiz at it. But I recognized that, even as technology and CAD and all of this was developing quickly, conventions were observed. We’d start a new project, and we’d bring all the references and documents into the conference room. We’d sit down, everybody would snap open their laptops, and start punching up stuff. I said, ‘Look, what if this project had nothing to do with all the conventions?’ You’ve got some programmer breathing down your neck, giving you this limited assortment of conventions. [I thought,] Let’s rethink it. What else could it mean? Is there another way it could be interpreted? It became kind of a goal in life.

I’ve designed everything from bottles, silver, coffee cups, all sorts of objects. But in every case, there’s always something about it where you knew that this was not something that my mother would buy. [Laughs]

I was always suspicious of anything that everybody else was doing. And I think that was the point [of my work], to keep the functional elements alive. If you do a door handle, it’s still got to be a door handle, no matter what. But it doesn’t have to be exactly like every door handle you see. I always thought, Well, can’t you just keep the practicality of the convention, but give it a different meaning?

What makes a quality home today? That is a mega question, which can open up a whole world, which is a mess, as you can imagine. There is the loss of certain ethical values, certain ideas of the home, certain family values. I am 92. In my entire life, I’ve never seen, other than two world wars, anything like the conditions that pervade living [today]. There are burdens, and it’s very difficult now. Because often, these great lifestyles are experienced by the rich, while [other] people don’t even have a roof over their heads.

I often think if I had to sit down with Donald Trump, we would have no conversational starting point. That’s a sad thing. [Elements of ‘the good life’] are always flashing through my mind, about anything of comfort, or security, or a general ambience. All of these things can be segregated and given to just one group or another. There are divisive policies going on. And that is very profound. It’s gnawing away at me, of course, because I’ve started doing a lot of soul-searching. But it makes that question very, very difficult to answer.”

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. (Photos: William Bradford Wines)