“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.” 

— Flannery O’Connor

VINES Architecture is a 16-person practice located in Raleigh, North Carolina. The studio is led by Victor Vines, AIA, born in the Eastern town of Pinetops, North Carolina and Director of Design, Robert Thomas, AIA, who, perhaps now representative of many residents of the contemporary South, has spent 46 years split equally between the Midwest and the South, in Raleigh, North Carolina. We resist the classification of our work as Southern and reject many of the romanticized, tropes of the Southern vernacular —tobacco barns and corn cribs, porches and porticos, barnwood and textiles—whose ‘reinterpretation’ too often proves to be a convenient crutch for even contemporary architects. The preoccupation with identity and our often redacted legacy of Southern mythmaking has often allowed us to selectively focus and edit our collective memory of the past, reinforce historical boundaries, and to ignore many of the physical and psychic scars still evident in the fabric of our towns and cities and within our own conscience.

In our work, we are interested in mutable boundaries and a more permeable threshold-- between building and landscape, architecture and the city, the universal and the specific, urban and rural, and perhaps the more significant and self-conscious cultural boundary between The South and the rest of the country. Whether working in Durham or Detroit, Cleveland or Greensboro, we instead focus on the more urgent and shared need of repairing our collective social fabric and creating truly inclusive, vibrant spaces in the public realm; spaces that build community, foster dialog, and hopefully, move us all closer to an understanding of what it might mean to be human.