BEST PRODUCTS SHOWROOM

Designed by SITE; completed 1975 Houston, Texas
The Best Products building located in Houston, Texas, also known as the
“indeterminate facade,” was built in 1975 as a showroom by the architectural firm SITE
for the Best Products retail chain. The building is known mainly for its idiosyncratic
facade, which wraps a 65,000-square-foot, commercial-formula building with a high
brick wall that appears to be in the act of collapsing. The extended cornice is given an
irregular profile as though it were coming apart, and atop the entrance a massive pile of
bricks tumbles through a gap, resting precariously on a thin metal canopy. The building
presents a startling image when viewed within its suburban context, a strip center located
between Almeda Mall Shopping Center and a residential neighborhood along the Gulf
Freeway. Visitors’ reactions to the building have ranged from amusement to concerns for
the safety of the occupants; a common conjecture soon after the building opened was that
it was damaged by a Gulf coast hurricane or an earthquake. The apocalyptic vision was,
of course, apocryphal; inside the building it was business as usual.
The Houston showroom is one of several unusual designs that SITE produced for the
Richmond, Virginia-based company, each of them involving an eye-catching
embellishment of the facade. The commissions were in no small measure owing to the
patronage of the late Sidney Lewis, then president of Best, who was an avid collector of
contemporary art. Lewis was seeking ways to incorporate art into his showrooms to
distinguish them from the conformity of standard shopping-strip architecture. In an
earlier commission in 1972, shortly after the formation of the SITE group, the designers
enlivened a Best Products showroom in Richmond, Virginia, with the Peeling Front, a
facade that was molded in epoxy to create the appearance that the facing brick was
peeling away from the building’s backing materials. However, of all the SITE designs,
the Houston showroom was the one that was most photographed and that received the
most popular and critical attention.
SITE was organized in 1970 as a collaboration between Alison Skye, who was trained
as an art historian; Michelle Stone, a photographer and sociologist; and James Wines, a
sculptor. The confluence of their various disciplinary points of view resulted in designs
that rejected conventional architectural formulas for new inspirations found in
contemporary art (particularly the work of American Pop artists of the 1960s, such as
Claes Oldenburg), social commentary, and popular culture.
Wines, who became the chief spokesman for the group, described SITE’s work as
being about “de-architecture,” which he defined as a condition of reversing or removing
some quality or ingredient from architecture in order to destabilize it. It was a means of
defining an attitude or of changing standard reactions to the urban context, including the
ubiquitous strip centers that were burgeoning along America’s highways. In the Best
showrooms, they attacked the most banal, contemporary building type, the commercial
box, by subverting the traditional relationships between form, function, and economy. In
its place they foregrounded the often ambiguous relationship between the building’s
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 266
contents and the external influences of a more inclusive social and cultural context. The
SITE designs made the showroom buildings into memorable landmarks—no small feat
among the visual complexities and commercial excesses of the suburban strip. As
marketing strategies, their success could be measured in increased sales revenues for the
Best Company.
Curiously, the buildings also became the focus of intense architectural commentary,
perhaps because they distilled many of the interests of the Postmodernists—for example,
the idea of the decorated shed advanced by architect Robert Venturi—and pushed them
almost to the point of parody. Extensive critical review and coverage of the Houston
showroom in both the professional and the popular press included sympathetic reviews
by Gerald Allen (1977) and Bruno Zevi (1980), the latter of whose commentary was
titled “The Poetics of the Unfinished.” Opposite opinions were registered by architects
Lebbeus Woods, who considered the building to be little more than a “one-liner” without
sustaining power, and Léon Krier, who called it tragic and a setback for architecture.
The extraordinary amount of attention that was paid to the building owed partly to
Wines’s own polemical writings and interviews in which he described SITE’s mission as
a confrontation with the tenets of modern architecture, particularly the orthodoxies of
formal functionalism (that is, International Style). In the Houston design, with its
wholeness shattered by the appearance of chaos, the commentary went further,
constructing a deliberate subversion of the glossy conformity that expressed the
economic and building boom in the state of Texas. By liberating the facade and making it
a plaything of the imagination, the Best Showroom signaled the arrival of wit, parody,
and surreal figuration in architecture. These inversions on the standard architectural
formulas were similar to the fascinations of the avant-garde artists beginning with Marcel
Duchamp in the early 20th century, who worked to blur conventional categories and
definitions of art.
The Best Showroom has been described as both a mock ruin and a vision of
incompleteness or indeterminacy, Wines himself staunchly defending the latter
interpretation. As a constructed ruin, it was never romantic or reflective, as was the case
with many of the mock ruins or follies from history. Instead, it was intended to call
attention to itself by creating an architectural puzzle in which the viewer is invited to fill
in the missing pieces. As a cultural icon, it introduced to the strip the ambiguous sign
whose meaning had little relationship either to the contents or to the usual patterns of
signification that were characteristic of strip architecture. Wines used the freedom of this
new formulation to pursue a fusion of art and architecture, although in this case whatever
architecture there was in the design was largely devoured by the effusiveness of imagery
that is, after all, decoration. Because SITE never interfered with the formula for the
interior layouts of the showrooms, the projects portrayed a fundamental schism between
form and content—inside and out—that was a characteristic feature of much of the work
of the Postmodern architects.
Over the years, the building has settled into the landscape as an unselected period
piece of popular, architectural culture from another era. Rather than defining a direction
for architecture, its main accomplishment was to exhibit an ambitious and audacious,
aberrant behavior. The Best Products company declared bankruptcy in 1991, closing its
Houston showroom in 1992. After sitting idle for several years, the building was
reoccupied as a video store and its indeterminate facade outfitted with a new, red-neon
script sign advertising the new tenants.