SITE (Sculpture in the Environment, Inc.)
American, 20th century
James N. Wines, delineator
American, born 1932
McDonald's Floating Restaurant, Systems of Support of a Three Layer Big Mac, Sketch
INV-1909
SITE (Sculpture in the Environment, Inc.)
American, 20th century
James N. Wines, delineator
American, born 19321982–1983
McDonald's Floating Restaurant, Systems of Support of a Three Layer Big Mac, Sketch
SITE (Sculpture in the Environment, Inc.) American, 20th century James N. Wines, delineator American, born 1932 →20th Centuryarchitectural drawingarchitecture
Date
1982–1983
Medium
Ink line on white paper
Dimensions
35.2 × 42.5 cm (13 7/8 × 16 3/4 in.)
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Location
Chicago, IL
Credit
Through prior gift of the Three Oaks Wrecking Company
James Wines’ firm SITE was founded as a practice for “de-architecture,” focusing on inverting and complicating architectural convention. Central to this endeavor is his belief that art has been relegated to the status of decoration in contemporary society. As a response, SITE treats architecture and art as a hybrid practice and a social extension of a building’s context. The firm became famous for a series of showrooms for the Best Products Company, which were designed as humorous environmental sculptures with trompe l’oeil facades or elaborate displays like a building-sized terrarium. SITE designed a special restaurant for McDonald’s in a similar vein. Although the realized building is fairly conventional, an early design by SITE playfully explores the idea of the restaurant as a giant Big Mac. This design is in many ways the perfect embodiment of architect Robert Venturi’s “Duck” theory, a kind of iconography in which a building’s space, structure, and program are fully subsumed into an overall symbolic form.
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