Forest Building

Forest Building or Forest Showroom is a former retail building in Henrico, Virginia. Built in 1980 as a retail outlet for catalog merchant company Best Products, it was one of several postmodern stores designed for Best by James Wines and his firm SITE. After Best Products liquidated in the 1990s, most of its stores were demolished or substantially altered. In use as West End Presbyterian Church since 2000, the Forest Building is the last remaining Best Products store to retain its original exterior design.

History
In the early 1970s, Best Products founders Sydney and Frances Lewis contracted with Wines' firm SITE (short for "Sculpture in the Environment") to design nine unique showrooms for the company. The Forest Building was designed around preexisting trees on the site in suburban Henrico County in 1978 and completed in 1980. Prior to construction, "specialists spent months on the building site, re-training the roots of the trees to grow away from structural footings and foundations and preserving the natural undergrowth."

The building operated as a Best Products showroom until the company's liquidation in 1997. In 1999, the building was purchased by West End Presbyterian Church, a Presbyterian Church in America church plant, which moved into the space in 2000 following interior renovations that preserved Wines' forest exterior concept. The church hosts architecture students and other visitors interested in the last extant Best Products showroom.

Architecture
As with the eight other SITE-designed Best Products showrooms, the design was a standard big-box store with an unusual visual twist that, according to Kurt Kohlstedt, "began to deconstruct the idea of the big box store in ambitiously literal ways." At the Forest Building, SITE proposed building the entrance of the warehouse around existing trees on the site. According to curatorial text prepared for a Museum of Modern Art display of Forest Building designs, the building "reimagined the big-box store, manipulating setting, site, and façade through radical 'invasions of nature,' challenging visitors to strip malls with unexpected architecture. Here, an ordinarily untamed element of nature transforms a banal architectural type through a tongue-in-cheek intervention, creating a new environment in the expanses of a suburban parking lot."

What would otherwise appear to be a typical big-box store brick exterior was designed as a screen in front of trees separating the façade from the rest of the store. Wines intended for it to be a “massive incision, splitting the building apart and allowing giant oak trees and ground cover to march through the open chasm.” Shoppers entered the store by walking through the 35-wide gap full of trees and grasses across bridges, creating an effect "reminiscent of a Japanese tea garden" evoking "a mood of peaceful surrender to nature," according to Fitchburg State University art historian Jessica Robey. The separation of the façade from the building is marked by irregular brickwork signifying ruin. and which was intended to evoke a building reclaimed by nature. The sensation is enhanced by the use of rounded Gunite lining the inside of the gap, creating a contrast with the "taut brick skin of the exterior" and making "the wrench of 'unbuilding' almost palpable."

Reception
According to architect David Douglass-Jaimes, when they were built, the "tongue in cheek" Best Products showrooms were "often met with staunchly negative criticism―especially following the completion of Indeterminate Façade in Houston―by the mainstream architectural press who saw no place for humor in architecture, but the Lewises continued to support the work in spite of the critical response." However, Douglass-Jaimes noted that artists and art critics considered Wines' "exploration of decay, neglect, and artificiality [to] critique the throwaway nature of American consumer culture, the source of his clients’ business success." Virginia architectural historian Richard Guy Wilson said that the glass wall of the showroom visible through the trees undermined the Forest Building concept and described the "overall impact [as] more that of a slightly miscued joke than a profound architectural experience."

In later years, however, the Forest Building, along with the other SITE-designed Best Products showrooms, has received substantial acclaim from art and architecture critics and curators. Wines' sketch and original model for the Forest Building were included in MoMA's 2009–2010 exhibit "In Situ: Architecture and Landscape," and the original sketch was featured in MoMA's 2012–2013 exhibit "9 + 1 Ways of Being Political: 50 Years of Political Stances in Architecture and Urban Design," the latter of which noted that "[w]ith popular appeal, the buildings raised political awareness of consumer culture, creating intriguing oases in commercial landscapes, where a sense of place was frequently missing." In Stir, Vladimir Belogolovsky said that "[b]y the very act of placing art where people least expect to find it, Wines taught us how to be more observant, curious, and critical of our everyday environment. His efforts expanded the profession by making buildings more artistic, imaginative, process-oriented, open-ended, and of course, more integrated with nature." Writer Margaret McCormack described the Best Products showrooms as "architectural statements" that balanced "spite and sincerity," adding that "SITE at the time had all the swagger and irony, but without contempt for the users or client."

In the 1990s, Washington Post critic Benjamin Forgey considered the Forest Building―designed late in SITE's engagement with Best Products―to add a "serious, albeit witty, involvement with nature" to the earlier showrooms' "engaging fusion of pop art and surrealism." Edwin Heathcote refers to the Forest Building in particular as "a fantastic tribute to an explosive architectural moment."

Return to nature concept
Many critics and observers have noted the building's ruin-like appearance. While other SITE-designed showrooms played on "the impression of sudden disaster," the Forest Building developed "another theme common in SITE’s work—that of nature consuming human artifice," Robey says. "This concept was first fully realized in the Best Forest Building (1980, Richmond, Virginia), which incorporated surrounding trees into the body of the structure." McCormack noted that the showrooms' fates illuminates the transient nature of big box suburban development, even as the buildings were designed to poke fun at this big box store typologies. That the Forest Building survived only by being transformed into a church affirms the ephemerality of big box architecture, she adds.

University of Glasgow art historian Dominic Paterson also observed that the Forest Building, like the other SITE buildings, evoked the passage of time and "often played with the appearance of ruin, with their façades variously fabricated as fractured, crumbling, or peeling," with the added irony that "[i]n the years since they were constructed, these unique buildings have themselves been subject to ruination, first through the closing of the Best Products chain, then through the subsequent dismantling of their decorative façades, and finally—in most cases—their complete demolition." He adds that the Forest Building "was a commercial retail showroom built as a 'ruin-in-reverse,' itself made obsolete by commercial collapse, which now serves as a site of belief, support, display, and exchange."

The Forest Building became a progenitor of other SITE projects that played on these themes. According to Robey, "the building consumed by nature became a common motif for SITE in the eighties, along with 'unfinished' architecture, artificial ruins and archaeological excavations, and theatrical inversions, which defied conventional use-patterns and even, apparently, the laws of physics." Wines himself has said the Forest Building was conceived as an expression of "nature's revenge."

Wines' reaction to renovations
Wines was later critical of the renovation carried out by the church. After initially being "elated by the prospect of civic/religious appreciation and the assurance of preservation," he later came to view the renovation as "one of such blatant destruction that I kept hoping the structure would be mercifully removed in its entirety." Despite "maybe [having] good intentions" on the part of the new owner, the building was "virtually destroyed" by "a local architect who surgically removed every element that looked suspiciously like art." Wines also criticized the removal of certain trees and ground cover, the addition of concrete paths added to the forested area for accessibility purposes and the elimination of terrarium gardens in the façade.