Forest Building, Richmond, Virginia (Perspective)

SITE

James Wines

1978

A felt‑tip pen sketch showing exploratory ideas for low, rectangular showroom buildings that the designers intended to embed and camouflage within planted berms and stands of trees to fuse architecture with landscape.

Quick, energetic strokes and heavy crosshatching present multiple perspectives and bird’s‑eye studies of boxy, earth‑covered volumes half‑hidden by dense vertical foliage, giving a tactile impression of mass and vegetation rather than precise measured detail.

As a working drawing for a corporate commission, it exemplifies SITE’s experimental tactic of treating retail architecture as sculpted landscape and reflects a broader late‑20th‑century shift toward integrating buildings with their environmental context and valuing iterative sketching in design.

Palette

Art Terms

Architectural drawing Architecture Drawing Sketch Perspective Landscape Built environment Ink

Exhibitions

Built in USA: Post-War Architecture

1953

Modern Architecture for the Modern School

1942

Integrated Building: Kitchen, Bathroom, and Storage

1945

Visionary Architecture

1960