Endlessly Congenial

“Since I am here, it proves that the AIA does not make any snap judgments,” quipped James Wines, the endlessly congenial founder of SITE, from the rostrum at the AIANY Center for Architecture. As an artist and designer, Wines, 90, has made lasting contributions to the architectural discipline, but prior to his September 15 talk, he had never been invited to lecture at the center. Wines made the most of the opportunity, speaking for over an hour about his expansive career and regaling the packed hall with charming anecdotes and bons mots. After a precocious start in his twenties making installation pieces (“They sold well”), he found himself gravitating toward spatial practice. He was critical, however, of the “plop art” approach, which he illustrated with several images of curvy Henry Moore sculptures stranded in windswept modernist plazas. Postmodernism’s prizing of erudition over craft also came under fire: “I came more from conceptual art, and the thing lived and died on its own merits. Before you theorized it, it had to be done first.” As the talk wound down, Win…