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 is The Ohio State University’s "multidisciplinary, international laboratory for the exploration and advancement of contemporary art". The Wexner Center opened in November 1989, named in honor of the father of Limited Brands founder Leslie Wexner, who was a major donor to the Center.
Peter Eisenman won the design competition for the Wexner in 1983 
The Wexner Center's 108,000 square feet (10,000 m²), three-story building was designed by architects Peter Eisenman of New York and the late Richard Trott of Columbus with landscape architect Laurie Olin of Philadelphia. It was the first major public building to be designed by Eisenman, previously known primarily as a teacher and theorist. Based on the controversial theory that art should be "challenged" by its environment rather than displayed neutrally, the museum raised Eisenman's profile and he went on to design and build a number of other major projects including the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin.

The design includes a large, white metal grid meant to suggest scaffolding, to give the building a sense of incompleteness in tune 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 which grids it followed. The result was a building of sometimes questionable functionality, but admitted architectural interest. The center's brick turrets make reference to the medieval-like armory building that occupied the site until the 1958.

Included in the Wexner Center space are a film and video theater, a performance space, a film and video post production studio, a bookstore, café, and 12,000 square feet (1,100 m²) of galleries.