Word: eisenman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Wexner Center is, appropriately, both grand and zany, yet unlike earlier Eisenman designs, it does not seem meanspirited. And it works. The site, shrewdly chosen by the architects, is the 48-ft.-wide space between a tidy 1979 concrete cube of a recital hall and a huge, Albert Speerish auditorium built in 1956. The new construction knits these clunky boxes into a tightly woven, slightly mad-looking but altogether sensible complex. The four soaring exhibition galleries, with a gridded glass ceiling and gridded glass wall, are deluged in natural light...
Like all of Eisenman's work, the Wexner Center is an obsessive meditation on the grid, modernism's elemental unit. For starters, Eisenman has lined up the building with the Columbus city grid rather than the campus grid -- an off- kilter tilt of 12 1/4 degrees. Within the complex, he has laid down still more grids to play with: the 12-ft. modules of white steel scaffolding, structural columns set 24 ft. apart, decorative columns 48 ft. apart. He lets these various grids overlap and collide, creating quirky niches and three- dimensional geometric cat's cradles everywhere. Inside, the experience...
...point of all this highly wrought architectural scribbling and juxtapositioning? Why, in a single glimpse, is there brick, tinted glass, clear glass, white glass, white metal panels, white steel, white stone, concrete and red stone? Because to pull off such an improbable collage is a virtuoso feat -- Eisenman is like a chess master playing several games at once while standing on his head. Because the dense, dense eclecticism of material and form prevents the place from seeming too slick and self-serious. And - because Eisenman remains rather perverse. The four painting and sculpture galleries, for instance, amorphous and oddly shaped...
...that postmodernism has abandoned its original sense of humor in favor of just-so classicism, it is Eisenman who is left to build in the architectural jokes: the disintegrating ersatz archway and cartoony castellated brick towers around the perimeter of Wexner (alluding to an old armory on the site that was razed in 1958); the curious floor-to-chest-height windows in the top-floor offices; the short, folly stairway that goes nowhere; or the boatlike carbuncle on top of the building with no practical function whatsoever...
...Eisenman has finally allowed himself to learn the most enduring lesson of his old postmodern nemeses: the necessity of fitting in with nearby buildings, even the motley, uninspiring ones. Wexner, tucked between off-white masonry buildings, is clad partly in white limestone, and for all its coming- apart-at-the-seams wildness, the building is actually rather low-key, never overwhelming its campus. "We're on the short list for a new building at Yale," says Eisenman, the contextualist-come-lately. The location, he says nonchalantly, as if he had not spent the past 20 years ranting against any hint...