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
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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.

BERLIN WALL, BERLIN

The Berlin Wall stood in Berlin, Germany, for 28 years, 2 months, and 26 days.
However, it was not just any wall—it was the Wall: politically, a symbol of the post-World
War II Cold War world order; architecturally, an example of the power of the most basic
building block of architecture; and artistically, a giant 166-kilometer-long blank canvas.
After the defeat of the Third Reich in 1945, both Germany and its capital, Berlin, were
partitioned into four zones, each under the administration of one of the Allies: Great
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Britain, France, the United States, and the USSR. The partition of Germany was done so
along existing provincial boundaries. The partition of Berlin, which was located in the
middle of the Soviet sector, was done so in terms of postal codes.
In 1949 the French-, British-, and American-controlled sectors were merged to form
the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), with Bonn as its capital. In that same year, the
Soviet-controlled eastern quarter of Germany became the German Democratic Republic
(GDR), with (East) Berlin as its capital. Although the USSR proclaimed the sovereignty
of the GDR in 1954, East Germany effectively was an internally run satellite of the
USSR.
Between the years 1949 and 1961, it is estimated that approximately three million
people, or roughly one-sixth of the population, fled from the GDR to the West. This
exodus occurred both along the 1,400-kilometer border with the FRG and from East to
West Berlin. Because the refugees were from all professions and mostly under the age of
25, the GDR soon faced a social and economic crisis, especially in terms of the loss of
trained and specialist personnel.
To stop this flow of refugees, armed units of the GDR began to seal off the open
border between East and West Berlin in the early morning of 13 August 1961. The border
between the GDR and the FRG was also sealed, and West Berlin became, in effect, an
island in the middle of the GDR. The justification for these fortifications was clear in the
GDR’s name for them—“the antifascist protective barrier”—suggesting the prevention of
the West from coming in, not the prevention of the East from going out.
At first the Berlin Wall was merely a hastily constructed barbed-wire fence with
armed guards. During the remainder of 1961, these initial fortifications rapidly grew
more sophisticated. In front of the Brandenburg Gate, soldiers constructed a seven-foothigh
(2.1 meters), six-foot-deep (1.8 meters) tankproof bar rier with steel posts and
prefabricated concrete slabs laid flat and held with mortar. Elsewhere in Berlin, concrete
slabs were laid vertically and then topped off with square concrete blocks and barbed
wire.
On the eastern side of the Wall, the GDR then slowly began to construct a no-man’s
land. First, a second wall was built approximately one city block (100 meters) into East
Berlin. This system was perfected with lookout towers, searchlights, tank traps, dog runs,
trip wires, alarmed fences, and ditches in between the two walls. Then the above-ground
division was doubled underground as Berlin’s subway lines were severed and terminated
at the border. Eventually, all roads, train lines, canals, and other transportation routes in
and out of West Berlin were either severed or controlled by GDR border police.
In some areas of Berlin, the East-West border ran right down the middle of a street,
thanks to the previously mentioned decision to use postal codes as the division line. In
these locations, the buildings on the East were evacuated and their openings bricked up,
effectively making the buildings themselves the Berlin Wall. Eventually, these buildings
and also the early versions of the Wall were demolished and replaced with the
superefficient “fourth generation,” or 1979 version, which proved to be the most famous.
It consisted of four-foot-wide (1.2 meters) prefabricated concrete L-shaped panels nearly
12 feet (3.6 meters) high, laid side-by-side in mortar and topped with a round concrete
tube. Each panel weighed 2.6 tons and had to be installed with a crane.
This last version of the Berlin Wall is the one that became famous for its graffiti. Soon
after the 1979 version was built, all sorts of comments, slogans, stories, constructions,
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figures, and grotesque fantasies began to be written, stenciled, and painted onto it. Every
year, the GDR border guards would dutifully paint over these scribbles in a futile attempt
to draw attention away from them, and every year the Wall would fill right back up with
its multicolored messages.
The Wall soon became no longer a thorn in the side of West Berlin but rather an asset,
almost a tourist attraction. Tourists from around the world no longer came to West Berlin
to take in an opera or to visit a museum but rather to marvel at this three-dimensional
expression of an arbitrary line on the map. The American artist Keith Haring painted a
vast stretch near “Checkpoint Charlie” in 1986 and held a press conference afterward.
After that point, the Wall was considered art.
The beginnings of the fall of the Berlin Wall can be traced to the 1985 election of
Mikhail Gorbachev as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Gorbachev’s policies, which allowed the satellite nations of Eastern Europe to determine
their own affairs, brought about demands in those countries for more freedom. In May
1989 the Hungarian government opened its border with Austria, thereby lifting
Churchill’s famous “iron curtain” and allowing GDR citizens to travel to the West via
Hungary. On 9 November 1989 the GDR announced on the radio that all citizens were
free to travel wherever they wanted. This decree effectively rendered the Berlin Wall
useless.
Within one year, the Berlin Wall was practically destroyed by both angry East
Germans and hungry souvenir hunters. Other parts were dismantled and recycled for road
construction. On 3 October 1990 East and West Germany were officially unified into a
single Federal Republic of Germany. In 1995 one watchtower and four stretches of the
remaining Berlin Wall totaling 1.71 kilometers were placed under protection and
designated as historical monuments. The Wall thus officially became history.