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ARCHITECTURE VIEW

ARCHITECTURE VIEW; The Museum That Theory Built

ARCHITECTURE VIEW; The Museum That Theory Built
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November 5, 1989, Section 2, Page 1Buy Reprints
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A medium-sized museum in a medium-sized city that has been underwritten by a rich retailer and designed by an architect who has never before built a museum would seem like a prescription for total irrelevance. And the fact that the museum will open without a single picture on its walls might seem to render it not only irrelevant but laughable.

But not every donor is Leslie H. Wexner, and not every architect is Peter Eisenman. And so the opening later this month of the Wexner Center for the Visual Arts on the campus of Ohio State University here not only is not irrelevant, but it has become one of the most eagerly awaited architectural events of the last decade. Progressive Architecture magazine devoted a whole issue to the building even before it was finished; architects like Philip Johnson, Michael Graves, Richard Meier and Charles Gwathmey are coming to Columbus later this month to mark the building's completion with a public forum on the state of American architecture, and the guest list for the opening-night dinner on Nov. 16 includes such regulars to the Columbus social circuit as Barbara Walters, A. Alfred Taubman, Martha Graham and Colleen Dewhurst.

For some of these visitors, the allure is Mr. Wexner, the billionaire founder of the Limited Inc. sportswear chain, who contributed $25 million toward the center's $43 million cost. But for most, it is Mr. Eisenman, probably the world's most celebrated architectural theoretician, and his building, an arts center designed primarily as a monument to architectural theory, not to the service of art. By design, the Wexner Center will have no pictures up on opening night: for now, the building is exhibition enough. It is a structure of sharp, angular forms, brick turrets and a 540-foot-long framework of white-painted steel, designed in defiance of conventional architectural practice - and yet, in the end, strangely rich and powerful by conventional architectural standards.

Peter Eisenman, 57, who practices in New York, has made a career out of trying to shift architecture out of the realm of the practical and into the realm of the theoretical; he pursues dogma with the same joyful determination with which his friend and intellectual sparring partner Philip Johnson pursues historical cribbing. To Mr. Eisenman, architecture is less the molding of space to solve a problem than it is the concrete realization of a theoretical idea.

Mr. Eisenman has not, understandably enough, gotten a great many buildings up. (The Progressive Architecture issue was headlined ''Eisenman Builds,'' which is something like saying ''Garbo Talks.'') When his design for this project, done in association with the Columbus architect Richard Trott, was chosen by a jury in a prestigious architectural competition in 1983 over four other finalists all more experienced in building large structures, he had not built anything larger than a house. Since then Mr. Eisenman has gone on to complete an apartment building in Berlin and has got a few other institutional buildings under way, and earlier this year he and Mr. Trott, who have formed a partnership to design several projects, won a second Columbus competition, with their design for a new convention center for the city.

Mr. Eisenman's theories focus on a desire to reject the conventions of architecture. He spurns traditional notions of buildings as responding directly to their functional needs, for example, in favor of using architecture as a means of expressing other kinds of formal order. He firmly rejects the traditional idea of the building as a single, solid, ordered object sitting in space, in favor of blurring distinctions between inside and outside, between top and bottom, between front and back.

All of this yields buildings that tend to be sharp and angular, full of what appear at first glance to be completely disconnected parts. From the outside, the Wexner Center looks like an amalgam of incomplete and broken-apart brick turrets, modernist sections of aluminum and glass, red sandstone walls and, as a kind of signature element running the length of the building, the framework of white-painted steel set in a grid that looks like a 540-foot-long, 50-foot-high scaffold.

In each of his projects, Mr. Eisenman says, he aims to create a building that is ''not a singular, unified object [ but ] a building that attempts to move beyond singularity of place to a multiple, dynamic idea of what enclosure is, what defines inside and outside.'' That could be pretentious nonsense, but as it translates into this building, at least, it bears heeding. For the Wexner Center is a remarkable structure: not nearly so disconcerting as it professes to be, it is a building of intense, brilliantly controlled energy and, at moments, of surprising serenity. This is a difficult building, but not nearly so difficult as Mr. Eisenman's rhetoric would have us believe, and once you get beyond the architect's words, what is revealed is a building of considerable sensual power.

Mr. Eisenman's work is closely connected to the theories of deconstructivism, the approach to architecture that was the theme of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1988, in which Mr. Eisenman's architecture was shown; indeed, he is the pivotal figure in deconstructivism, both its intellectual guru and its cheerleader. One of the best things about the Wexner Center is the way Mr. Eisenman has completely transcended one of the primary problems of deconstructivists, which is their desire to make buildings that float free, as pure, formal objects lacking any connection to their surroundings. The design of the Wexner Center comes right out of the architectural and urbanistic context of the Ohio State campus; this building could be nowhere but its present site, wedged tightly between a limestone-clad auditorium and a modernist recital hall on the edge of the campus.

It is no exaggeration to say that the very theme of this 108,000-square-foot, three-story building is an attempt to explore the underlying nature of this site. Its form has been generated not by the functional needs of the center but by larger urban patterns. The campus of Ohio State University is set on a grid that is roughly 12 degrees off from the street grid of the city of Columbus, and Mr. Eisenman has taken this skew and made it the basis for the Wexner Center's layout. Thus the long scaffoldlike steel structure, which serves as a walkway through the complex, is set on the city grid, making it appear to slice a diagonal swath through the campus and through this building. The walls of the rooms inside the building are set on either the city grid or the campus grid, making the internal organization of the building emphasize this city-campus duality further. Even the patterns of granite in the floor, the fluorescent light fixtures on the ceiling and the colors in the carpeting play off on the diagonal relationship between the two grids.

In his attempt to evolve a kind of contextual version of deconstructivism, Mr. Eisenman has also delved into the archeological past of this site. The segments of brick turrets recall an armory that stood here until 1958, when it was demolished after a fire. This is not the soft, comforting use of historical form that has become so popular in this post-modern age, however; by the very design of these turrets as partial, broken, or split elements, Mr. Eisenman is trying to evoke the armory's presence as much as he is trying to remind us that it is gone.

The columns aspire to a kind of harsh monumentality, although in truth, even with their broken forms they still come off as more than a little sentimental and nostalgic. Mr. Eisenman here is not nostalgic for perfection, as are so many post-modern lovers of the picturesque, but for imperfection. Had the armory not once been a burned ruin, would he have been so entranced with it, and so eager to bring it back as part of his building? I think he is wistful for the angst this building's memory represents.

But this detail shows us that, when you get right down to it, Peter Eisenman is as much a romantic as any other architect. He once told an interviewer that the university had requested that the Wexner Center respond to the art of the 21st century, ''but we cannot know what the art of the 21st century will be, so we responded by making a building that is waiting to be a building.'' This phrase - ''a building that is waiting to be a building'' - could only be spoken by someone who is in love with the idea of the avant-garde, and takes great joy in romanticizing it. Peter Eisenman is as sentimental as Robert A. M. Stern, in his way - it is just that he is nostalgic for the idea of the avant-garde.

How does the building work? Surprisingly well, considering how little its architect professes to care about such things. The building contains a handsome lecture hall and film theater, a space for performance art, an utterly unappealing, below-ground library (the worst aspect of the building by far), and several galleries arranged in a stepped-up sequence along a spine parallel to the long outdoor scaffold. The galleries have few large walls for hanging, and they tend to be interrupted by columns set along the building's relentless grids, but they are zestful spaces nonetheless, representing better than any of the other portions of the interior this building's peculiar mix of intense energy and unexpected repose. They are also awash in natural light.

Robert Stearns, the capable director of the Wexner center, has wisely decided not to hang any pictures in the galleries until several months after the building opens. (The first exhibition, a look at the art of the 1950's and 1960's, is scheduled for Feb. 16.) It was a masterly political decision, for it guarantees that Mr. Eisenman and Mr. Trott's work and not the art on display will be the focus of attention when the building opens. It also manages to put off for some time the inevitable debate over the building's suitability as an environment for the display of art. By the time the first show opens, the building will no longer be such news, and the debate will take on a less urgent tone.

In fact, the process of displaying art in the Wexner Center will not be the impossible task it might at first seem. These galleries can take only a few pieces, and the art will have to be strong enough to stand up to Mr. Eisenman's insistent architectural presence and yet not too similar to the architecture in its own esthetic slant. The building will obviously squash a soft landscape painting like a bulldozer. But what is less apparent is the way in which the powerful lines of a Franz Kline painting, for example, which might seem at first to be exactly right for this building, could be almost too much to take here: Kline's lines of force are so intense that it is easy to imagine them and this powerful architecture resonating at the same esthetic frequency, an esthetic version of the physical phenomenon that takes place when a building is vulnerable to earthquakes. Even before its opening, this building has been a cathartic experience for Ohio State, a campus that has heretofore had no significant architecture to speak of, and for the city of Columbus. What is particularly striking is the extent to which students have begun to pay attention to this building, to seek to immerse themselves in it, even in its closed state. The other day an art class was sitting under the grid of the scaffolding, a dozen sketches of the Eisenman building in progress, as a roller skater made his way around and through the latticework of columns, in and around and through. It was like a piece of performance art: the sketchers sketched, and around and among them the skater glided slowly down the grid, which in the distance slants up toward the sky, rising taller and taller until, at the end, it confronts nothingness.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section 2, Page 1 of the National edition with the headline: ARCHITECTURE VIEW; The Museum That Theory Built. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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