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But that does not mean the building is easy to understand or like. Running its whole, three-city-blocks length is a permanent, jungle gym-like white steel scaffolding. The faux scaffold is inspired: it defines a long outdoor walkway, it plays tricks with perspective (Does the thing tilt up? Down? Are its beams parallel?), and its evocation of construction in progress makes the Wexner Center seem perpetually unfinished, excitingly open-ended.
Like all of Eisenman's work, the Wexner Center is an obsessive meditation on the grid, modernism's elemental unit. For starters, Eisenman has lined up the building with the Columbus city grid rather than the campus grid -- an off- kilter tilt of 12 1/4 degrees. Within the complex, he has laid down still more grids to play with: the 12-ft. modules of white steel scaffolding, structural columns set 24 ft. apart, decorative columns 48 ft. apart. He lets these various grids overlap and collide, creating quirky niches and three- dimensional geometric cat's cradles everywhere. Inside, the experience of architectural structure is nearly kinetic: as you enter, a fake beam shoots past at eye level and simply stops in midair, cleanly cut off, while a fake column stops 10 ft. short of the floor, stalactite-like. Eisenman is relentless. His precisely orchestrated riot of pattern and angles continues even with the placement of fluorescent light fixtures in the basement, even in the arrangement of gravel on the roof.
What is the point of all this highly wrought architectural scribbling and juxtapositioning? Why, in a single glimpse, is there brick, tinted glass, clear glass, white glass, white metal panels, white steel, white stone, concrete and red stone? Because to pull off such an improbable collage is a virtuoso feat -- Eisenman is like a chess master playing several games at once while standing on his head. Because the dense, dense eclecticism of material and form prevents the place from seeming too slick and self-serious. And - because Eisenman remains rather perverse. The four painting and sculpture galleries, for instance, amorphous and oddly shaped, could tend to confound picture hanging. "I don't want to say they're not problematic," admits Robert Stearns, the Wexner Center's very game director.
Now that postmodernism has abandoned its original sense of humor in favor of just-so classicism, it is Eisenman who is left to build in the architectural jokes: the disintegrating ersatz archway and cartoony castellated brick towers around the perimeter of Wexner (alluding to an old armory on the site that was razed in 1958); the curious floor-to-chest-height windows in the top-floor offices; the short, folly stairway that goes nowhere; or the boatlike carbuncle on top of the building with no practical function whatsoever.