James Wines

James Wines (born 1932) is an American artist and architect associated with environmental design. Wines is founder and president of SITE,^[5] a New York City-based architecture and environmental arts organization chartered in 1970.^[6] This multi-disciplinary practice focuses on the design of buildings, public spaces, environmental art works, landscape designs, master plans, interiors and product design.^[7] 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^[8] was released by Rizzoli International Publications. There have been twenty two monographic books museum catalogues^[9] have published his drawings, models and built works for SITE.^[5] In total, Wines has designed more than 150 projects for private and municipal clients in eleven countries. He has won twenty-five writing and design awards including the 1995 Chrysler Design Award.^[10]

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^[11]