Eisenman in Columbus, Ohio

I have experienced two of Eisenman's projects numerous times over the course of my undergrad at Ohio State; walking past the Wexner Center of the Arts everyday on the way to class and spending many Saturdays watching my sister play volleyball at the Columbus Convention Center. From my first year architectural history courses I knew they were Eisenman projects, but beyond that I never understood them and I am surprised they were never revisited in the remainder of my coursework. This weeks lecture on how Eisenman is driven by form first and human interaction second, made me have an "ah-ha" moment to understand why these two projects make sense in the context of Columbus, Ohio.

The city of Columbus is a grid with all major streets running north to south, leaving all of the side streets to run east to west. High Street is the Cardo and Broad Street is the Decumanus with the two intersecting in the heart of downtown. Ohio State's campus lies immediately off High Street and to the north of downtown, with the campus breaking the city grid by rotating it's own grid 12 degrees. Looking more into the Wexner Center for the Arts, Eisenman was interested in the connection between the city grid and the campus grid, with the site for this project sitting on the border between the two. So by using one of the east-west streets in the city grid, he extends this axis as an entry point to the Wexner center. What became an interesting clarification for me was that this axis continues further and connects all of the major landmarks on campus: the northern path of the oval green in the center of campus, through the main tower of University Hall, and along the open side of Ohio Stadium which is shaped like a horseshoe. This axis is the main driver for the project for which he follows this move with a perpendicular axis as the main circulation and is what we see as the white structure which is a double passageway, where the second passage is enclosed and separated by a curtain wall. The structure for no actual purpose is of course a grid to reinforce the grid of the city/campus. So what I always thought of as a strange, confusing, and out of place building on campus is actually a tie between the city and the campus and I am glad to understand now it is much cooler than I thought.