Pershing Square

“Sustainability,” “green,” “eco-friendly”: these terms have become bywords associated with the contemporary city. With the inception of LEED certification in 1998, and the advent of sustainable technologies such as solar panels, today’s urban designers are increasingly immersed in the conversation around sustainable design. Archit ect and sculptor James Wines (b. 1932), however, has been grappling with these questions since the early 1970s. His work has proven so influential within the architecture community that in 2013 Wines was recognized with a Lifetime Achievement award from the Cooper-Hewitt as part of their National Design Awards program. Wines, president and co-founder of the architectural firm SITE, has used his design platform to transform the traditional hierarchy between architecture and nature, the tendency to “discard” vegetation as secondary to our built surroundings, proposing instead an assimilation of structure and environment. “Buildings conceived of as integrations of structure and landscape,” he writes, “are mutable, metamorphic, and evolutionary, constantly conveying new levels of information.” For Wines, built, natural, and social contexts are in perpetual dialogue. “Sostenibilidad”, “verde”, “ecológico”: estos términos se han convertido en sinónimos de la ciudad contemporánea. Con el inicio de la certificación LEED en 1998 y el advenimiento de tecnologías sostenibles como los paneles solares, los diseñadores urbanos, hoy en día, están cada vez más inmersos en el diseño sostenible. El arquitecto y escultor James Wines (n. 1932), sin embargo, ha estado lidiando con estas preguntas desde principios de la década de 1970. Su trabajo ha demostrado ser tan influyente dentro de la comunidad de arquitectura que en 2013 Wines fue reconocido con el premio Lifietime Achievement de Cooper-Hewitt como parte de su programa National Design Awards.