James Wines

James Wines (born 1932) is an American artist and architect associated with environmental design. Wines is founder and president of SITE, a New York City-based architecture and environmental arts organization chartered in 1970. This multi-disciplinary practice focuses on the design of buildings, public spaces, environmental art works, landscape designs, master plans, interiors and product design. 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 was released by Rizzoli International Publications. There have been twenty two monographic books museum catalogues have published his drawings, models and built works for SITE. 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.

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