Chapter 1 of 24
James Wines & Alison Sky 1985
JW: SITE is an interdisciplinary architecture and design organisation founded in 1970, basically for the purpose of exploring new ideas for the visual environment. And it was founded by myself, James Wines, and Alison Sky and we were later joined by Michelle Stone and John de Vitry and Joshua Weinstein all presently within the firm. Our firm is composed of approximately twenty people, artists, architects and designers, and the range of our work is, again, totally interdisciplinary, everything from teacups to commercial buildings, to houses, to public spaces. AS: We grew our work, and our attitudes grew out of the interdisciplinary arts, activities of the 60's than I guess of a formal, architectural attitude. We've always been a collaboration of artists, architects, sociologists, psychologists, so our work is very informationally-oriented and very site oriented. JW: I think that the aspect of our work that is clearly and completely different I think probably from most architectural firms is that we deal with psychology, ambiance, sociological situation much more than we do with formal information. I think most architects when they go about designing a building; usually start with a formal order or stylistic persuasion as a premise. They take a functional problem and apply to it design principles. Our method is really quite different. We start really with information, as Alison has said. It's really like the program, for example, would then in fact be followed through and resolved. Within that, information would be recycled' through, in a sense, an art-making process, which is quite different from a design process. Architecture is really our subject matter and not our objective. Meaning that once you've solved all the problems, particularly in a building, you, by recycling that information and letting it be invaded by all kinds of outside ideas, you change the context of the building totally.