SITE’s work is about narrative in architecture. We believe that spaces and buildings should communicate with the people who use them; they can tell a story that goes beyond their particular function and communicate larger messages relating to the cultural identities of their users. We have tried to expand definitions in architecture, which is why we have used the term ‘de-architecture’ to describe the process of opening architecture up to the information of our time. Modernism, too, was about expressing the vision of a new world, but once it became a formula it defeated the creative purposes with which it began. What we wanted to do from the start was to link back into earlier ideas. We believe there are no new ideas; you simply recycle ideas through the sensibility of your own time.

Our work is the result of an interdisciplinary collaboration between artists and architects, all within the same design firm. Had we all had similar training, we wouldn’t have been able to step back and question what was going on in the way we did. In a more traditional firm of architects or artists, people tend to reconfirm each other’s idols or icons. When we started in 1969, there was a tremendous amount of interdisciplinary activity going on, especially in Europe. In the United States, however, people found interdisciplinarity rather confusing: we didn’t have the tradition of dialogue between the arts and architecture that there was in Europe.