Peter’s Tantrum

I returned to the Wexner Center a few months ago to check out its $15.8 million renovation, recently completed and much ballyhooed. I found that the building remains as annoying and ominous as its designer no doubt intended it to be. High Street, the main drag adjacent to the Ohio State University campus, was decked in streetlamp banners an-nouncing the happy news (“Wex Wide Open”), but the walk up to the front door, the passage through the black-glass-clad vestibule, remained as uninspiring as before. A concrete embankment and a forlorn site-specific Maya Lin installation lurked off to the left; to the right a long white trellis offered a slightly more inviting stroll. One enters the disjointed Wexner at the point of maximum disjointedness, the place where its several grids and manifold conceits—the faked-up pictorial traces of a former armory, the famous stub of the hanging column that does not quite descend to block the main stair—attempt to coalesce into a building that will serve a programmatic function, university arts center, and a psychological one: giving vent to its architect’s de-mons. It’s no secret, given the university’s giant post-occupancy expenditure, that the latter urges prevail.

My antipathy to Peter Eisenman’s work, and indeed to the man himself—admissible, I’ve always argued, since he has put his personality and the tics thereof at the center of his work—was first centered in my general aversion to “theory” as it was being promoted and practiced in architecture culture in the mid-1990s: sterile, arcane, divorced from terrestrial and marketplace givens, as clearly a covert crutch for formalism as it was derivative of the spoutings of a few celebrated Frenchmen. If theory begot buildings like the Wexner, its promoters were digging their own art-historical graves.

In 1995, right out of architecture school and interviewing for an editorial job at ANY magazine, I made the honest mistake of telling Cynthia Davidson, ANY’s editor and Eisenman’s wife, that I was skeptical of the value of theoretical maunderings such as those she was publishing at the time (and which the prosier, more observational writings of Davidson’s new publication, Log, seem themselves to refute). She was clearly taken aback, the interview was over, and I didn’t visit the couple’s shared office again until more than two years later, when I had to speak to Eisenman for a profile on one of his collaborators.

I was looking forward to that meeting, which would be our first, as a chance to experience firsthand the vaunted erudition of the great wizard and to spar, perhaps, but with words. Instead it nearly turned into a fight of the ordinary kind when Eisenman, in a pattern that I only later learned was utterly commonplace, grew so paranoid at my presence in his office that he accused me of espionage (“How would you like it if I came to your office and spied on you?”) and drove me backward—a well-practiced bully—to the elevator. It took a long time to come, and though I did consider asking if I should wait or rather take the fire escape down (the summer before my friend Ernest Pascucci, a former editor at ANY, had jumped to his death from that fire escape)—anything to get this barking madman out of my face—I don’t think that confrontation unduly colored my opinion of Eisenman’s work.

Indeed prior to that meeting I had already published my first article on Eisenman. In the December 1997 issue of Oculus I wrote a review of Chora L Works, the book in which Eisenman and Jacques Derrida documented their ill-fated collaboration on a project for a section of the Parc de la Villette, in Paris. That book, publishing connoisseurs and lovers of the absurd will recall, had been printed and then subjected to a die-cutting machine in Hong Kong that pressed a pattern of voids through the already difficult to decipher words and images. The resulting tiny, square doughnut holes, decorated with chance-caught fragments, were hastily gathered up and shipped express to New York in time for a joint book-launch appearance by the two authors at the Cooper Union. I had heard of this behind-the-scenes action beforehand and was expecting magic at the event: the little chads burned or read or assembled as part of some intelligent performance. When I arrived at the Great Hall and saw that they had merely been scattered on top of several copies of the book, which had then been shrink-wrapped and signed by the authors, and were being offered at a significant markup as a limited edition, I lost faith in, patience with, and all respect for alternative architecture’s would-be role model, sage, and jester—a stance that only hardened the following summer when I first visited the Wexner Center.

The recent big-budget midlife renovation has corrected severe environmental problems with that structure—leaking windows (nearly half an acre of them) and related temperature and humidity-control problems that made it difficult for the museum to display (or receive on loan) delicate works. The day I visited the guards were thrilled: they no longer needed to patrol the building scouting for drips, adjusting buckets, keeping a weather eye peeled. But the cause of the leaks—the raked white-steel “greenhouse” at the heart of the museum in which structural elements intersect at off angles (about one-half a nausea-inducing degree out of true)—has not been corrected. It is, after all, the Wexner’s signature element—and several guards, eyeing the Ohio winter through the glass, agreed that it was just a matter of time before the buckets returned.

I don’t know what Eisenman sought to say with this building; and believing that architecture should be its own best explanation, I don’t really care. I’ve never read the many interviews or tracts on the subject. I do recall Eisenman claiming—at that long-ago event with Derrida—that his work had “brought postmodern architecture to its knees,” and it may be true. But if so, it was like chemotherapy to a cancer patient. The Wexner, to which he was referring, also brings its occupants to their knees: when I was there the thought of kneeling at one of its toilets never left my mind. All of the architectural effects that he marshaled—the ramps and intersecting grids and embossed surfaces—merely add up to a system of empty ornament, the experience of which enervates the eye and torments the inner ear. It is clear that in this, Eisenman’s first major built work, he was doing little more than throwing a tantrum.

The architecture of the Wexner Center, whatever Eisenman intended, is about power. It is about the power of its designer to affect you (you get dizzy, Peter wins); the power implied by his ability to realize a project that did not, even at its first ribbon-cutting, serve his clients’ needs; the power evident when an architect succeeds in creating a healthy myth for a building in the face of its physical failure. It is not, as one might hope for in such an influential work, about the power of architecture—which, even in a time so mired by postmodern insipidities, might have been much more convincingly displayed, with more fascinating and durable results, if the architect could have for a second got past what I will here gently refer to as his issues. In essence the Wexner Center is Eisenman’s temperament made manifest: willful, self-involved, and veering toward violence. But now, for a few seasons at least, it is dry.