Peter Eisenman spent his 30s and 40s being the angriest, most intellectually convoluted, infuriating major architect in America, a really terrible enfant terrible. Both his innumerable theoretical essays and his few buildings (four houses in two decades) seemed pretentious and willfully opaque, caricatures of neomodernism. One Eisenman house had a column in the bedroom that precluded a bed, another a hole in the floor and a stairway that ran from the ceiling halfway down a wall. The architect used to say he would not dream of living in one of his houses ("Art and life are two different things").
But all that has changed. "I was a killer, a trained killer, and you can't keep that up," Eisenman, 57, says today. "Peter Eisenman is ultimately a friendlier person -- kinder, gentler. People are going to like my buildings more." In fact, he suddenly has lots of plum commissions -- an office building in Tokyo, a research complex at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University, the Columbus convention center. Meanwhile, he will bask this week in the celebrations surrounding the dedication of his first major building, the $43 million Wexner Center for the Visual Arts at the Ohio State University in Columbus.
For Wexner, Eisenman teamed up with the far more conventional Columbus architect Richard Trott ("I went in for the touchdown, and Dick was the blocking back who knocked guys over"). The building is certainly the best work of his career, an intense, almost out-of-control collage of materials and forms. "There's no question that this is my most completely realized building," he says. "In a sense it's my first building." He still would not want to live in any of the houses he's designed (his home is an 18th century cottage in Princeton, N.J.), but the new building in Columbus is another matter. "I'd love to work in Wexner," Eisenman says.
As would anyone who does not mind being tricked and teased by the architecture at almost every turn. The new building (paid for mainly by O.S.U. alumnus and Columbus-based retailer Leslie Wexner) may have been the perfect project for this hyperintellectualizing bad boy to prove himself on: it was conceived by the university as both a museum and a seedbed for avant-garde art, from Anselm Kiefer paintings to Pina Bausch performances to a new video installation that displays images from the building's surveillance cameras. Did the university want a fin-de-siecle monument to erudite monomania, inspired nervousness, the intriguing lunatic gesture? Eisenman was the man for the job. "I get weepy that O.S.U. took this risk," he says. "It wasn't Harvard or Yale or Princeton. It's a great thing about America that people in Columbus, Ohio, are building this crazy building."
The Wexner Center is, appropriately, both grand and zany, yet unlike earlier Eisenman designs, it does not seem meanspirited. And it works. The site, shrewdly chosen by the architects, is the 48-ft.-wide space between a tidy 1979 concrete cube of a recital hall and a huge, Albert Speerish auditorium built in 1956. The new construction knits these clunky boxes into a tightly woven, slightly mad-looking but altogether sensible complex. The four soaring exhibition galleries, with a gridded glass ceiling and gridded glass wall, are deluged in natural light.