The New York Times, July 21, 1996, A&L, p. 33.
Architecture View / Herbert Muschamp
Eisenman's Spatial Extravaganza in Cincinnati
[Photo] Four previously scattered schools of the
University of Cincinnati are united in a building whose
main feature is an 800-foot-long subterranean concourse.
Cincinnati. Peter Eisenman's new building here is a
stunning feat of interior decoration. To describe it thus
is not to belittle it in any way. Wedged between two older
buildings and an earth berm, the University of Cincinnati's
Aronoff Center for Design and Art has no exterior to speak
of. Its entrance, framed by a tumbling stack of
candy-colored slabs, is plopped unceremoniously atop a
parking garage. Step inside, however, and it is open-sesame
time.
Cheerful, bewildering, generous, controlling: this is not
a building one simply walks through. One works through it,
as if it were an emotional problem. The problem turns out
to be that of history: the twisted background of an art
form that has deposited this amazing artifact into our
midst.
The Aronoff Center, already a mecca for architects although
it doesn't open officially until October, is but one of a
group of buildings that have brought great distinction to
the University of Cincinnati and indeed to the city itself.
Jay Chatterjee, dean of the College of Design,
Architecture, Art and Planning, has earned himself a place
in history as one of the century's most enlightened
patrons.
With a master plan by George Hargreaves and individual
buildings by Michael Graves, David Childs, Wes Jones, Harry
Cobb and Frank Gehry, Cincinnati is one of the most
architecturally dynamic campuses in America today. More
than that, the state university has risen to one of the
major challenges of the contemporary city. Show us
something new. Give us big, urban objects that we can look
at, discuss, love or despise.
Ohio has been good to Peter Eisenman. Columbus is the site
of his two most important American projects to date, the
Wexner Center for the Arts (1989) and the convention center
(1993). Along with the Aronoff Center, these buildings have
established Eisenman as a leading practitioner as well as
a theorist of architecture.
As the home of the college for art and architecture,
serving 1,500 undergraduates and 240 graduate students,
Eisenman's project occupies a prominent place in the
university's building program. The building, designed in
association with Richard Roediger of Lorenz & Williams,
brings together four schools that were previously scattered
over the 392-acre campus: art, architecture, planning and
design. And its main feature, an 800-foot-long subterranean
concourse, is designed as if to represent a multiple
collision among these disciplines.
The concourse serves the conventional function of a
circulation spine connecting the different parts of the
building. But form here does not follow function. Rather,
the reverse seems to be the case: classrooms, auditoriums,
a library, a cafeteria, an art gallery are inserted,
virtually as afterthoughts, within an exploration of space.
With each step, the concourse expands, contracts, changes
axis, reveals new vistas. Bridges pass overhead. Ramps and
staircases lead off at unexpected angles. Skylights let the
sun into areas that might otherwise remind you of the last
act of "Aida." It's a neo-Baroque interior, Piranesi
without a pope. Shrewdly, Eisenman has employed inexpensive
materials and fittings: gypsum walls, catalogue lighting
fixtures. These help create a provisional, studio
atmosphere, as if the building were itself a pinup project,
a thesis mocked up to full scale. (The lighting in the
library is a dud.)
Compared with the concourse, the classrooms, studios and
offices are considerably less spectacular. Eisenman
describes them as "vanilla ice cream." But in fact the
building becomes more disturbing when Eisenman lowers the
volume. The unexpected slope of a ceiling plane, the
off-axis tilt of a window: such peripheral features create
spaces that are more subtly disorienting than the spatial
extravaganza of the concourse.
And "there's no design in it!" This is what Peter Eisenman
often says about his buildings. What he means by this, I
take it, is that he does not sit down at a drawing board
with the intention of creating preconceived visual or
spatial effects. Instead, like a conceptual artist, he sets
up a system, a kind of geometrical formula for producing
forms and spaces. Here, the formula is some mumbo jumbo
involving "chevrons," "traces," "baggage carousels" and
whatnot. Loosely translated, the idea is that the forms of
the Aronoff Center are derived from the older buildings
adjacent to it, and from the contours of the landscape in
which it nestles.
The specifics of the system don't matter much. What's
important is that Eisenman wants to absent himself from his
own creation. The theoretical underpinning for this passive
stance is derived from the French school of literary
deconstruction and its lament for "the death of the
author." By now, this idea is as stale as yesterday's
baguette. But since it has stimulated Eisenman to make such
an extraordinary place, the idea at least deserves
consideration as a recipe for delicious French toast. It's
the key to this building's importance.
In an interview, Eisenman states that this building cannot
be read "within the norms of architectural history." Wrong.
The building fairly grabs you by the collar, shakes you up
and down, and demands to be read in terms of historical
precedent. The building is provocative; its forms are
abstract; it makes conspicuous use of grids. These features
plant the building squarely in the tradition of modern
architecture. So does Eisenman's passive stance, which
reprises the modern idea that form should be determined by
such objective factors as function or structure, not by an
architect's whim.
Or, rather, it is a travesty of that idea. The building
mocks objectivity as a form of passive aggression. Look,
Ma, no design! Only an architect deeply saturated in
history would bother to conduct this exercise. Most
architects abandoned long ago the belief that design should
aspire to objectivity. But for Eisenman, history is
apparently a nightmare from which architecture is still
struggling to awake. He says, let's analyze it.
In a sense, the Aronoff Center is the contemporary
equivalent of those 19th-century Beaux-Arts edifices
inscribed with the names of the great artists, writers, or
philosophers. The building's weirdness demands an
explanation that can be supplied only by thinking back
through Mies van der Rohe and, beyond him, to the
Enlightenment and its insistence on the authority of
reason. The exercise may prove infuriatingly didactic, but
this is, after all, a school. I can't think of another
recent American building that serves history more
responsibly. It should also give those who study here a
firm nudge toward finding a place in history of their own.
[End]
To see b/w photo:
http://pwp.usa.pipeline.com/~jya/pe1.jpg
