Best Products Showroom, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Perspective

James Wines’s firm SITE was founded as a hybrid practice fusing architecture and art. In the 1970s SITE received a commission from the retailer Best Products Company to design nine signature showrooms around the country. Wines responded with a series of designs that began with the recognizable structure of a bigbox store, and then applyed exterior surfaces that appear to be deformed or transformed in different ways. This series was best known for its trompe l’oeil designs, including a facade that appears to be crumbling into a pile of bricks. The drawing for the Best Products Showroom in Milwaukee shows the brick veneer of the building removed in layers to reveal the steel structural beams and HVAC, and a row of store racks staged like a Hollywood set outside of the real glass curtain wall of the building.