James Wines

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

James Wines (1932- ) is an American architect associated with environmental design. Wines is also an architectural and design innovator, a product designer, and an educator. Wines explicitly expresses his own "concern for the Earth." Having written at length on new modes of architecture, design, and planning, he has also provided succinct critique of the status quo in statements like:

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

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. Wines founded SITE, Environmental Design^[1] in 1970. Wines has been the designer of more than 150 architecture, environmental-art, interior-design, public-space and landscape-architecture projects, including ones sponsored by numerous large corporations (e.g., Swatch, MCA Universal, MTV, Nickelodeon, Williwear, Isuzu, Disney, Costa Coffee, Carrabba's Restaurants, Saporiti Italia, Brinker International, Allsteel, Ranger Italia, Reliance Energy Corporation). His municipal clients have included the cities of Hiroshima, Yokohama, Toyama, Seville, Vienna, Vancouver, Le Puy en Velay, Chattanooga, and New York City. 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, 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 1984-90. After teaching at Domus Academy in Italy and at the University of Oklahoma, he became a professor of architecture at Pennsylvania State University (1999 to present). Wines has received a number of fellowships and grants including the Fulbright Distinguished Professor Grant to the University of Toronto (2004), National Endowment for the Design Arts — critical writing on architecture (1992).