A former Best Products building in the Ashland area (Photo courtesy Virginia Museum of History & Culture)
Quick: What building in the Richmond region featured more than 2,000 porcelain-on-steel panels with overlapping 33-foot-tall letters stretching 18,000 square feet across its exterior?
If you answered the Best Products catalog distribution center near Ashland, you aced today’s Flashback pop quiz.
The New York firm Sculpture in the Environment (SITE) created the building, one of nine designed for Best Products between 1972 and 1984. The design considered the surroundings, offering high visibility to motorists on Washington Highway (U.S. Route 1).
The construction of the catalog distribution center as a gigantic concrete box with 100 loading bays started in 1978, but the pièce de résistance — the “anti-sign” installation — was completed by mid-August of 1979. The lettering in different shades rendered the company’s name almost illegible, like one of those posters that make you squint your eyes to distinguish the image. But it caught people’s attention.
“Even from a quarter of a mile away, the sign is clear and ‘moves’ beckoningly,” observed the Signs of the Times industry journal.
“It’s called an anti-sign because it’s not what you expect it to be,” SITE architectural principal Alison Sky explained to Richmond Times-Dispatch art critic Robert Merritt. He observed that Sky “waited to see if she was going to be taken seriously before she continued.”
She emphasized the importance of the sign in relation to U.S. 1. “The sign is kinetic,” she said. “It moves, seems to pick up speed as you pass it on the highway.”
The Lewises bridged the chasm between art and commerce by making their business artistic.
SITE architects James Wines and Michelle Stone chose porcelain enamel because of its durability and longevity. “This sign will never look shabby,” Wines told Signs of the Times.
The anti-sign remained in 2000 when the Supply Room Co. moved into the vacant building. Owner Yancey Jones recalls, “That was baked enamel, and it looked as good in 2000 as it did when they put it up.”
Sydney and Frances Lewis founded Best Products Co. Inc. in 1957 in Richmond. Best started as a mail-order business until the Lewises realized potential customers wanted to see the merchandise. They turned the company into a catalog retailer, with full-color tomes that displayed the wares customers could order and pick up at one of the showrooms. It was sort of like a pre-internet Amazon.
The Lewises bridged the chasm between art and commerce by making their business artistic. Their flagship stores deviated from the traditional concept of a chain, but they were recognizable. The company understood “branding” before that term went mainstream.
The Lewises often visited New York for contemporary theater and, while there, developed an interest in the art of the time. Their purchases jump-started the careers of artists who became stars of their world in the 1970s and 1980s, from Andy Warhol to Chuck Close, sculptor Duane Hanson, Jim Dine and Alex Katz.
They collected the art, lived with it and donated to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. They amassed these works in part, especially early on, by offering appliances and other products that the cash-poor artists couldn’t otherwise afford.
Best Products, by 1982, reached sales of $1 billion from showrooms throughout the United States. At one point, Best was the country’s second largest seller of diamond jewelry.
The Peeling Building, a former Best Products building along Midlothian Turnpike (Photo courtesy Virginia Museum of History & Culture)
The SITE-designed Best showrooms in the Richmond region included the Peeling Building (1972), on which the brick facade of the Midlothian Turnpike Beaufont Mall store (across from Cloverleaf) appeared to be coming off — or getting stuck on — as one might place an adhesive for a package mailer.
The Forest Building, at 9008 Quioccasin Road, in 1979 displayed a concern for the environment that is perhaps more common in projects today.
“Specialists spent months on the building site, re-training the roots of the trees to grow away from structural footings and foundations,” David Douglass-Jaimes writes in a Dec. 7, 2015, post for ArchDaily, “and preserving the natural undergrowth, allowing nature and architecture to coexist. … Only later did SITE founder James Wines realize that the added shading from the preserved trees significantly reduced the building’s need for air conditioning in summer months.” Today, the Forest Building, home to the West End Presbyterian Church, is the only SITE Best structure standing as designed. The others are demolished or bereft of what made them special.
The Forest Building, a former Best Products building on Quioccasin Road, today home to the West End Presbyterian Church (Photo by Steve Hedberg)
Shifting winds of retail preferences crashed the company against commercial reefs, and it closed in early 1997. Perhaps if it had been able to adjust and maintain, rather than Amazon choosing New York City and Northern Virginia for new offices, Best would be expanding its international headquarters here.
The size of the Ashland anti-sign made acquisition by a local museum prohibitive. “We recycled 20 tons of metal,” recalls Supply Room owner Jones, adding, “kind of a shame because it was kind of neat as an art picture.” He kept just one piece of enamel, which is on display in the firm’s entrance lobby with pictures of the sign.
SITE also designed the 1975 Best corporate headquarters that I toured in March 1997 during liquidation of its art and furnishings. Once thrumming with the energy of a busy hub for a chain of 88 stores, the building off East Parham Road near Interstate 95 then resembled a sound stage after a show’s cancellation but before they dismantled the sets.
While meandering around, I encountered a former employee who wistfully recalled how working at Best caused her to appreciate the company’s attention to aesthetics. “You didn’t realize how lucky you were until you went into other corporate environments,” she said.
One piece I found, as though left there for my metaphorical purposes, was a 1975 oil on canvas by Marilyn Minter, titled “Last Floor.”
Minter is a well-known contemporary painter of photo-realist, yet abstract, works of gritty and often provocative subjects.
This one depicted a textured hardwood surface across which was strewn a clothes hanger, the scattered parts of a child’s ring-toss toy and an electrical cord.
They looked like the last bits of a moving day.
