BEST In Prayer
What Do You Think You're Looking At? #174
If you’re at all an architecture nerd, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of BEST Products, the catalog retailer that set up a handful of very unusual, creative showrooms in the 1970s.
Some of them are still standing, a few have been demolished, but only one of originally nine is still intact and recognizable. It’s in Richmond, Virginia, where the company was headquartered, and it was known as the Forest Building. That wasn’t some wishful thinking, like those subdivisions named “The Meadows at [some town name.]” There were actually trees integrated into a quasi-outside part of the building. And there still are.
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."
It looked, and looks, like this:
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Here it is on the 3D view on Google Maps, where you can see the extent of the false facade:
Here’s a cool illustrated post on it on a Virginia Facebook group.
These images are copyrighted, so I can’t download and embed them, but here’s a screenshot of some Flickr results (and one of them linking to the photographer’s page).
The Facebook post author—who is also the photographer!—wrote this, in case you’re wondering how exactly a retail showroom could have been preserved as it became a church: “They’ve made some modifications, such as removing windows from the front fake facade, but it's been remarkably kept up otherwise.” Not bad.
Another nice comment, which I suppose wouldn’t be out of a place for a church either: “Loved that store. They had a nice Christmas light display between the walls.”
And: “Back when I worked for Shipp & Wilson, in the mid ’80s, it was one of our maintenance contracts. There were many native species planted in the fault void.”
One more (about the company owners, not the building): “As a kid I bought Xmas gifts at Best in the 70s and 80s, Springfield Mall. Later for a summer job in mid 80s worked for a company that was building out all the exhibit spaces for a new wing in the VA Museum of Fine Arts all paid for by Best family.” (The family was Sydney and Frances Lewis—he doesn’t mean their last name was “Best”!)
You never know what information will turn on up on of these threads. Reading them closely is one of the primary bits of research I do for these posts. Even if I don’t find out something useful about the building, there are almost always these random, lovely memories.
Something to see—a momentary bit of whimsy. That’s worth tracking down.
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We had a BEST in Mentor, Ohio that I remember shopping at as a kid. As I recall, every item (or at least most big ticket items) had a ticket attached to them that you would bring up front to pay with (or perhaps you wrote down the stock number on an order sheet). After you paid, your order was picked from the warehouse section of the store and came to the front on a roller style conveyor belt. It was a bit like waiting for your luggage at baggage claim- you'd watch other people's purchases come down the belt before yours arrived.
Sadly, the Mentor store was just a plain box and not one of the more ambitious store designs. I only learned about the bold architecture fairly recently, but even our plain store was still pretty memorable.
I live in the apartments right next to this church! I change my oil and rotate my tires in this parking lot!