TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/112089/11208900.023

Text File | 1990-09-19 | 7KB | 122 lines

DESIGN, Page 84

A Crazy Building in Columbus

Peter Eisenman, architecture's bad boy, finally hits his stride

By Kurt Andersen


    Peter Eisenman spent his 30s and 40s being the angriest, most
intellectually convoluted, infuriating major architect in America,
a really terrible enfant terrible. Both his innumerable theoretical
essays and his few buildings (four houses in two decades) seemed
pretentious and willfully opaque, caricatures of neomodernism. One
Eisenman house had a column in the bedroom that precluded a bed,
another a hole in the floor and a stairway that ran from the
ceiling halfway down a wall. The architect used to say he would not
dream of living in one of his houses ("Art and life are two
different things").

    But all that has changed. "I was a killer, a trained killer,
and you can't keep that up," Eisenman, 57, says today. "Peter
Eisenman is ultimately a friendlier person -- kinder, gentler.
People are going to like my buildings more." In fact, he suddenly
has lots of plum commissions -- an office building in Tokyo, a
research complex at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University, the
Columbus convention center. Meanwhile, he will bask this week in
the celebrations surrounding the dedication of his first major
building, the $43 million Wexner Center for the Visual Arts at the
Ohio State University in Columbus.

    For Wexner, Eisenman teamed up with the far more conventional
Columbus architect Richard Trott ("I went in for the touchdown, and
Dick was the blocking back who knocked guys over"). The building
is certainly the best work of his career, an intense, almost
out-of-control collage of materials and forms. "There's no question
that this is my most completely realized building," he says. "In
a sense it's my first building." He still would not want to live
in any of the houses he's designed (his home is an 18th century
cottage in Princeton, N.J.), but the new building in Columbus is
another matter. "I'd love to work in Wexner," Eisenman says.

    As would anyone who does not mind being tricked and teased by
the architecture at almost every turn. The new building (paid for
mainly by O.S.U. alumnus and Columbus-based retailer Leslie Wexner)
may have been the perfect project for this hyperintellectualizing
bad boy to prove himself on: it was conceived by the university as
both a museum and a seedbed for avant-garde art, from Anselm Kiefer
paintings to Pina Bausch performances to a new video installation
that displays images from the building's surveillance cameras. Did
the university want a fin-de-siecle monument to erudite monomania,
inspired nervousness, the intriguing lunatic gesture? Eisenman was
the man for the job. "I get weepy that O.S.U. took this risk," he
says. "It wasn't Harvard or Yale or Princeton. It's a great thing
about America that people in Columbus, Ohio, are building this
crazy building."

    The 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.

    But that does not mean the building is easy to understand or
like. Running its whole, three-city-blocks length is a permanent,
jungle gym-like white steel scaffolding. The faux scaffold is
inspired: it defines a long outdoor walkway, it plays tricks with
perspective (Does the thing tilt up? Down? Are its beams
parallel?), and its evocation of construction in progress makes the
Wexner Center seem perpetually unfinished, excitingly open-ended.

    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 of architectural structure is
nearly kinetic: as you enter, a fake beam shoots past at eye level
and simply stops in midair, cleanly cut off, while a fake column
stops 10 ft. short of the floor, stalactite-like. Eisenman is
relentless. His precisely orchestrated riot of pattern and angles
continues even with the placement of fluorescent light fixtures in
the basement, even in the arrangement of gravel on the roof.

    What is the 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,
could tend to confound picture hanging. "I don't want to say
they're not problematic," admits Robert Stearns, the Wexner
Center's very game director.

    Now 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.

    And 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 of historical style, "seems to
call for a neo-Georgian classical box or something." Kinder and
gentler, indeed.