Artist 49: James Wines

James Wines was born in 1932 and is an American artist and architect.  He deals mainly with environmental design, working to integrate buildings with their surroundings.  This led him to found an architecture and environmental arts organization in 1970 called SITE.  This organization does everything from landscape design to product design.  Since 1969 Wines has lectured in fifty-two countries on various green topics and is currently a professor of architecture at Penn State University.  In 1958 he graduated from Syracuse University and became a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome.  To jump-start his career as a successful sculptor and graphic designer, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962.  Throughout his career, Wines has taught at several different Academies, Institutions, and Universities, in both the United States as well as abroad.  He very firmly believes that hand drawing is a key element in the artistic process, it does not necessarily have to be perfectly accurate but the action of drawing out what the artist wants to achieve allows them to explore the physical as well as the psychological aspects of each design.  In total James Wines has designed over 150 projects for both the private and public client in eleven different countries.