Wexner Center for the Visual Arts

Peter Eisenman – Wexner Center for the Visual Arts, Ohio State University, Ohio-USA, 1983-1989

The Wexner Center for the Arts It is a complex of buildings on the campus of The Ohio State University, located in Columbus, Ohio and inaugurated in 1989, designed by Peter Eisenman.
The Wexner Center contains research laboratories for various artistic fields, artist housing, exhibition spaces, media arts, film and video editing.
The three-story building of 10.000 m² The Wexner Center was designed by architects Peter Eisenman of New York and Richard Trott of Columbus with landscape architect Laurie Olin of Philadelphia. It was the first major public building designed by Eisenman, previously known primarily as a teacher and theorist. Based on the controversial theory that art should be "contrast" with its environment rather than neutrally displayed, the museum raised the profile of Eisenman, who went on to design and build a number of other major projects.

The design includes a large white metal grid that suggests scaffolding, giving the building a sense of incompleteness in keeping with the architect's deconstructivist tastes. Eisenman also took note of the mismatched street grids of the OSU campus and the city of Columbus, which vary by 12,25 degrees, and designed the Wexner Center to alternate the grids it followed. The result was a building of sometimes questionable functionality, but with great architectural interest. The center's brick turrets reference the medieval armory that occupied the site until 1958.

The Wexner Center space includes a movie theater and cinema, performance space, film and video post-production studio, bookstore, café, and 1.100 square feet of gallery space.