The Forest Building or Forest Showroom is a former retail building in Henrico, Virginia that is an example of late 20th century postmodern architecture. Built in 1978–80 as an outlet for catalog merchant company Best Products, it was one of several prominent postmodern stores designed for Best by James Wines and his firm SITE. Each of the SITE-designed showrooms featured a visual twist on late 20th-century big box store design―often playing on themes of ruin or disaster―and the Forest Building expressed these themes with a false façade in front of its actual entrance that enclosed a screen of preexisting trees, giving the store the appearance of a ruin that had returned to nature.
| Forest Building | |
|---|---|
_06.jpg) West End Presbyterian Church photographed in 2024 | |
  | |
| Alternative names | Forest Showroom West End Presbyterian Church |
| General information | |
| Architectural style | Postmodern |
| Address | 9008 Quioccasin Road |
| Town or city | Henrico County, Virginia |
| Country | United States |
| Coordinates | 37°36′24″N 77°34′18″W / 37.60659°N 77.57154°W |
| Construction started | 1978 |
| Completed | 1980 |
| Renovated | 2000 |
| Design and construction | |
| Architect(s) | James Wines |
| Architecture firm | SITE |
| Known for | Last extant Best Products showroom |
| Website | |
| www | |
While the SITE-designed Best showrooms received a critical reception when they were built, later commentators have praised them as architectural and artistic achievements. The Forest Building in particular was praised for its engagement with its natural setting. After Best Products liquidated in the 1990s, most of its stores were demolished or substantially altered. As of 2024, the Forest Building is the last surviving Best Products store to retain its original exterior design. Since 2000, it has been owned by West End Presbyterian Church.
History
editIn the early 1970s, Best Products founders Sydney and Frances Lewis contracted with Wines' firm Sculpture in the Environment (SITE) to design nine unique showrooms for the company. The Forest Building was designed around preexisting trees on the site in the Richmond, Virginia area in 1978 and completed in 1980.[1] Prior to construction, according to architect David Douglass-Jaimes, tree specialists spent months retraining the roots of trees to avoid the footings and foundation of the planned building.[2]
The building operated as a Best Products showroom until the company's liquidation in 1997. In 1999, the building was purchased by West End Presbyterian Church, a Presbyterian Church in America church plant, which moved into the space in 2000 following interior renovations that preserved Wines' forest exterior concept.[2][3][4] As of 2018, the church hosted architecture students and other visitors interested in viewing the last extant Best Products showroom.[4]
Architecture
editAs with the eight other SITE-designed Best Products showrooms, the design was a standard big-box store with an unusual visual twist that literally deconstructed the architectural form.[5] At the Forest Building, SITE proposed building the entrance of the warehouse around existing trees on the site.[1][2] According to curatorial text prepared for a Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) display of Forest Building designs, the building "reimagined the big-box store, manipulating setting, site, and façade through radical 'invasions of nature,' challenging visitors to strip malls with unexpected architecture. Here, an ordinarily untamed element of nature transforms a banal architectural type through a tongue-in-cheek intervention, creating a new environment in the expanses of a suburban parking lot."[6]
What would otherwise appear to be a typical big-box store brick exterior was designed as a screen in front of trees and ground cover that would separate the façade from the rest of the store.[7][2] Shoppers entered the store by walking through the 35 foot wide gap full of trees and grasses across bridges,[8] that induced a sense of surrender to nature in shoppers.[9] The separation of the façade from the building is marked by irregular brickwork signifying ruin.[10] and which was intended to evoke a building reclaimed by nature.[3] The sensation is enhanced by the use of rounded gunite lining the inside of the gap, creating a contrast with the smooth brick exterior and amplifying the sense of what SITE described as "unbuilding," according to Architectural Record.[8]
Reception
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Contemporary critics took note of the humor in SITE's work. According to Douglass-Jaimes, when the "tongue in cheek" Best Products showrooms were built, they were
often met with staunchly negative criticism―especially following the completion of Indeterminate Façade in Houston―by the mainstream architectural press who saw no place for humor in architecture, but the Lewises continued to support the work in spite of the critical response.[2]
However, Douglass-Jaimes noted that artists and art critics considered Wines' "exploration of decay, neglect, and artificiality [to] critique the throwaway nature of American consumer culture, the source of his clients’ business success."[2] Meanwhile, Virginia architectural historian Richard Guy Wilson said that the glass wall of the showroom visible through the trees undermined any profundity in the Forest Building concept and made the building more of a joke.[11]
In later years, however, the Forest Building, along with the other SITE-designed Best Products showrooms, has received substantial acclaim from art and architecture critics and curators. Wines' sketch and original model for the Forest Building were included in MoMA's 2009–2010 exhibit "In Situ: Architecture and Landscape," and the original sketch was featured in MoMA's 2012–2013 exhibit "9 + 1 Ways of Being Political: 50 Years of Political Stances in Architecture and Urban Design."[6] Later critics noted that by placing art in unexpected places like suburban strip malls, Wines triggered curiosity in observers about their daily environments[12] and described the described the Best Products showrooms as statement pieces that offered an ironic perspective without contempt for observers or clients.[13][14] The Forest Building―which was designed relatively late in SITE's engagement with Best Products[2]―was considered by a Washington Post critic to represent a more serious tone than the earlier Pop Art and surrealism-inspired SITE showrooms.[15] Edwin Heathcote refers to the Forest Building in particular as "a fantastic tribute to an explosive architectural moment."[14]
Return to nature concept
editCritics and observers have noted the building's ruin-like appearance.[10][9] While other SITE-designed showrooms played on themes of sudden peril, the Forest Building developed a theme of nature consuming human structures.[9] The ultimate fate of most of the showrooms—demolition—illuminated the transient nature of big box suburban development, even as the buildings were designed to poke fun at this big box store typologies. Writer Margaret McCormack pointed out that Forest Building survived only by being transformed into a church, which she said affirms the ephemerality of big box architecture.[13]
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University of Glasgow art historian Dominic Paterson also observed that the Forest Building, like the other SITE buildings, evoked the passage of time and "often played with the appearance of ruin, with their façades variously fabricated as fractured, crumbling, or peeling," with the added irony that
[i]n the years since they were constructed, these unique buildings have themselves been subject to ruination, first through the closing of the Best Products chain, then through the subsequent dismantling of their decorative façades, and finally—in most cases—their complete demolition.[10]
As the first building in which SITE fully realized the theme of ruin, according to architectural historian Jessica Robey, it became the progenitor for other SITE projects involving artificial ruins, excavations and deliberately unfinished projects.[9] Wines himself has said the Forest Building was conceived as an expression of "nature's revenge."[16]
Wines' reaction to renovations
editWines was later critical of the renovation carried out by the church.[4] After initially being pleased at the prospect of its preservation, he later called the renovation "one of such blatant destruction that I kept hoping the structure would be mercifully removed in its entirety."[17] Although he admitted the possibility of good intentions on the part of the new owner, he said the building was "virtually destroyed" by "a local architect who surgically removed every element that looked suspiciously like art," he said.[12] Wines also criticized the removal of certain trees and ground cover, the addition of concrete accessibility paths added to the forested area and the elimination of terrarium gardens in the façade.[17]
References
edit- ^ a b Dean, Penelope (2009). "Environment by Design" (PDF). ACSA Annual Meeting Proceedings. 97: 201. Retrieved 1 October 2024.
- ^ a b c d e f g Douglass-Jaimes, David (December 7, 2015). "When Art, Architecture and Commerce Collided: The BEST Products Showrooms by SITE". ArchDaily. Retrieved 25 June 2024.
- ^ a b May, Benjamin; Giddens, Tharon (December 15, 2015). "Hidden Richmond: Here Lies the Treasure". Richmond Magazine. Retrieved 26 June 2024.
- ^ a b c Richards, Daniel (August 22, 2018). "The Abandoned, Apocalyptic Architecture of One Bold 1970s Retail Chain". Atlas Obscura. Retrieved 26 June 2024.
- ^ Kohlstedt, Kurt (October 17, 1916). "Site Specific: Postmodern Best Products Showrooms Deconstruct Consumerism". 99 Percent Invisible. Retrieved 26 June 2024.
- ^ a b "Forest Building, Richmond, Virginia (Perspective)". 578.1981: Museum of Modern Art. Retrieved 26 June 2024.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: location (link) - ^ Gallanti (2018). "A Cut, a Move, a Forest". Harvard Design Magazine. Retrieved 2 October 2024.
- ^ a b "Between utopia and apocalypse: five projects by SITE" (PDF). Architectural Record. March 1984. pp. 134–145. Retrieved 26 June 2024.
- ^ a b c d Robey, Jessica (2003). "Appetite for Destruction: Public Iconography and the Artificial Ruins of SITE, Inc" (PDF). Invisible Culture (6). doi:10.47761/494a02f6.9d26dd26. Retrieved 26 June 2024.
- ^ a b c Paterson, Dominic (Winter–Spring 2020). "RESEARCH INTO THE BEST PRODUCTS ARCHIVES: A JOURNEY BY ARTIST SCOTT MYLES". Virginia History & Culture Magazine. Retrieved 26 June 2024.
- ^ Wilson, Richard Guy (1992). "Richmond Forest Building". The Making of Virginia Architecture. Richmond: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. pp. 412–413. Retrieved 26 June 2024.
- ^ a b Belogolovsky, Vladimir (August 30, 2022). ""Architecture needed to be liberated from itself," said James Wines of SITE". Stir world. Retrieved 26 June 2024.
- ^ a b McCormick, Margaret (July 22, 2014). "The Ironic Loss of the Postmodern BEST Store Facades". Failed Architecture. Retrieved 6 April 2024.
- ^ a b Heathcote, Edwin (February 5, 2020). "'If James Wines' greatest works were still around, they would be Instagram sensations'". Apollo Magazine. Retrieved 26 June 2024.
- ^ Forgey, Benjamin (October 9, 1998). "Flaws in a Showcase". Washington Post. Retrieved 26 June 2024.
- ^ Saunders, Zach (2021). "INTERVIEW WITH JAMES WINES". Arch2O. Retrieved 26 June 2024.
- ^ a b Skjeie, Alyssum (July 8, 2015). "James Wines: The Architect Who Turned Buildings Into Art". Storyboard. Carnegie Museum of Art. Retrieved 26 June 2024.
