Ohio State University Campus

Middle American Columbus, Ohio, is referred to as “Test City, USA,” meaning that it’s often used as a test market for products before they are (or are not) released more pervasively across North America. This median utopianism is visible at Ohio State University, where scattered across the campus are corflute placards with sincere affirmations such as “You belong,” “You’ve got this,” “Every day you’re getting stronger,” and “You make someone proud.” The campus is largely unremarkable, except for two structures that are the focus of this review. A source of enormous pride is the colossal, century-old Ohio Stadium in the centre of the campus, home of the Ohio State Buckeyes, with an audience capacity of over one hundred thousand, enough to seat more than ten percent of the city’s population. The campus is also notably the site of the Wexner Center for the Arts, a major 1980s project of Peter Eisenman, America’s most edge-lorded architect. The Center is named after billionaire Les Wexner, Ohio’s richest man, who has found himself in hot water recently due to his appearance in the US Department of Justice’s Epstein Files more than one thousand times. (Wexner has said, “I was naive, foolish and gullible to put any trust in Jeffrey Epstein.”) The architectural and aesthetic experience of the Ohio State University campus in Columbus is, as such, one in which we find both a distinctly American sense of sincerity and “wholesomeness,” and at the same time it is the site of some of the most abstract, ironising, and (intentionally) anti-humanist work in American architectural history. To dwell on contradictions is to reflect on our contemporary reality more generally.

Howard Dwight’s neoclassical Ohio Stadium was in its original 1922 form a horseshoe plan, aerial views of which depict the concrete colosseum-esque structure surrounded by swarms of human bodies. A series of extensions over a number of decades to increase the stadium’s capacity has enclosed the horseshoe, leading to something of a jarring juncture between the original curvilinear colonnade supporting the bleachers and the second layer wrapping around the horseshoe. This was a sincere attempt to replicate and expand the original building, but it might evidence a decline of skill and wealth typical of Rust Belt states. Regardless of the superior elegance of the original, slightly smaller stadium, the earnest civic gravitas remains.

The scale of Football’s civic, cultural, and perhaps even religious quality and function in American society is fairly difficult to parse, even for the most avid fans of sport in a country like Australia. The culture of Football, as depicted in the social realist NBC series Friday Night Lights (2006–2008, following the film Friday Night Lights, 2004, both based off H.G. Bissinger’s non-fiction book of the same name), in which an entire town’s culture revolves around the week-to-week trials and triumphs of a high school football team and the strategies of its coach, is quite unlike other Anglophone realities. Jeffrey Epstein’s friend, Noam Chomsky, pointed to American Football as part of the “indoctrination system” in relation to the thesis of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988). Another notable anti-sport theorist is Terry Eagleton (with respect to non-American Football). Meanwhile, defenders of the communal nature of sport against its commercialisation or marketisation include the politically syncretic Christopher Lasch and, recently, the contemporary American Leftist critic Jason Myles, as well as the English philosopher Simon Critchley in 2017’s What We Think About When We Think About Football (again, non-American, but still, Football). In this day and age, supporting a Football team IRL with any level of commitment or loyalty would seem to be the least insidious way to sedate oneself through “the spectacle” or “simulation.” We think it’s still possible for honour and dignity in a culture of sport. In an Ohio State Campus hotel room, pride in Ohio Stadium appears on a chair cushion, while the television in the same room plays reports on the Wexner–Epstein scandal. The TV reporter stands in the rotunda of the Greek Revival style Ohio Statehouse, though the Wexner deposition she’s reporting on actually took place in his home, designed by Robert A. M. Stern, former dean of the Yale School of Architecture, deceased last year.

Peter Eisenman’s Wexner Center for the Arts, designed in association with Richard Trott, is approximately 10 minutes on foot from Ohio Stadium. The primary elevation of the Wexner Center is best described as an abstract white spaceframe that collides with a series of red-brick volumes that vaguely resemble a kitsch simulacrum of a medieval castle. This latter component is a reference to the Ohio State University Armory and Gymnasium, completed in 1898, demolished in 1959. The white spaceframe or three-dimensional grid extends through the entire plan, puncturing the Center’s interior with floating columns and oblique misalignments against the geometries of the gallery layouts and corresponding positions of walls. The architecture is, in its entirety, as many of Eisenman’s projects are, a series of conflicting grids, through which the nature of architecture-as-a-language is explored semiotically and syntactically. At Wexner, the grid of the Ohio State University campus as a whole is juxtaposed, representationally via architectural form, with the broader city’s grid against which the campus grid rebelled.

Summarising Peter Eisenman’s work as an architect, theorist, and teacher is a difficult thing. To assume an art audience reading this review, it’s worth noting that Peter Eisenman’s collaborators have included Richard Serra, Jacques Derrida, and Albert Speer Jr. There are some similarities in the outlines of the figure Peter Eisenman and that of Harold Bloom; born two years apart, the former in New Jersey, 1932, the later New York, 1930, both were, and are, ingrained at Yale University, where Bloom taught from 1955 until his death in 2019, and where Eisenman has taught intermittently since the 1970s. Bloom’s influential 1973 book of literary criticism, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, is cited as a source of influence for Eisenman’s own conception and teaching of architecture, which is concerned with what he calls the “transformation of precedent.” (Eisenman’s debts to Bloom were noted at a panel discussion on the architect’s written work, with Bloom himself participating as a panelist despite saying that he “knows nothing about architecture.”)

However, unlike Bloom and his famous students, such as Camile Paglia, Eisenman’s defence of his own discipline and its canon came through an embrace of a wide range of theoretical references that might otherwise be accused of belonging to Bloom’s “School of Resentment.” Eisenman’s small-c catholic points of architectural-theoretical reference have included (this is a short list of less obvious examples): Adorno, Chomsky, Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari, and of course, Derrida (there is a complex relationship between Bloom and Derrida beyond the scope of these parentheses). In the 1970s, Eisenman helped popularise the Italian Marxist architecture historian Manfredo Tafuri, whose writing on architecture and capitalism influenced the American Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson (Eisenman also promoted the rise of the neo-Tafurian, Pier Vittorio Aureli). In return, it was Tafuri who is credited with having convinced Eisenman to actually design real buildings, if only as a promotional tool for one’s theory. Architecturally, Eisenman has maintained a long-held interest in the work of Italian fascist modernist Giuseppe Terragni, evidenced by books such as 2011’s Giuseppe Terragni: Transformations, Decompositions, Critiques. Eisenman’s willingness to embrace virtually anyone for the sake of architecture is a large part of his provocative reputation. Eisenman’s arguments include lines like “the architecture we remember is that which never consoles or comforts us” and “liberal views have never built anything of any value.” He has faced many controversies with respect to both the nature and qualities of his buildings, his rogue associations, and his DGAF rhetoric. Other controversies, such as those related to his Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (2004), point to the architect’s quote, “Look, I’m a Larry David fan, right? And it seems to me that Jewish history from the Talmud on has been a self-deprecating, self-critical kind of humour.” With respect to Ohio, this clip in particular comes to mind.

Eisenman’s intensely intellectual, formalist, a-material, and a-political approach to architecture (except for in the most obtuse Adorno-esque sense of “quasi-autonomy” and “criticality” on behalf of the artwork) is not very common among today’s architects. Eisenman’s fiercely expensive and ultra-abstract project of architecture suffered from the bursting of the Bilbao Effect, with Eisenman’s City of Culture of Galicia (1999–2011), another incongruent orgy of overlaid grids, implied by some to have single-handedly caused the Spanish section of the Global Financial Crisis. Architects today are far more likely to talk about the Climate Crisis than they are about Eisenman’s interest in deconstructing the Albertian humanist subject of “homogenous space,” or proving Derrida wrong in his claim that architecture is bound to the “metaphysics of presence.” Eisenman even wrote a book theorising why it’s good not to be “of the times.” And yet, the image above of the strange synchronicity of the Wexner Center’s three-dimensional grid(s) and one of the campus’s hundreds of food delivery robots seems to symbolise the alienating futurism of the present, our un-Albertian times, which might suggest that Eisenman’s anti-humanist architecture speaks to the abstract disharmony of our contemporary zeitgeist in a way that few contemporary architects do.

Ohio is also, beyond the Wexner-Epstein scandal, something of a fractured laboratory for claims as to “what America is”. JD Vance went to Ohio State, and Vance’s Yale classmate Vivek Ramaswamy just won the Republican nomination for the next Ohio gubernatorial race. Vivek came under attack from the populist Right for his infamous 2024 Christmas tweet, where he criticised Americans for “celebrating the jock over the valedictorian,” asserting “normalcy doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market.” Compare this cut-throat rhetoric to the Ohio State campus placards. It seems that populists Left and Right think “you got this” and “you belong.” Here we have something of a political horseshoe, the same shape as Ohio Stadium. At the same time populism is fracturing—the split between Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson, for example, or between MAGA and Nick Fuentes’s Groypers, not to mention splits between Left and Right or within the Left—suggesting that competing claims for what is “authentically American,” or just American at all, are as irreconcilable as Eisenman’s grids and theoretical references. Eisenman’s established edgelord character suggests he already understood the ontology of the internet long before social media, an impressive feat for a man too old for the Vietnam War draft. Maybe the Wexner Center is more of a monument to our age—Alien Slopworld—than that quaint old era referred to as “Postmodernism.” However, Peter Eisenman is not immune to the wholesome earnestness otherwise cultivated at Ohio State; in his 2014 contribution to the Baumer Lecture Series at the Knowlton School of Architecture at the university, he spoke wearing merch of the Buckeyes (the Football team) with utmost sincerity.

The status of Columbus as a marketing “Test City” implies some faith that the particular of Columbus contains some universal essence of America and the American, however fragmented and contested these things are. If the Ohio State University campus and its most notable architectures form an image that relates to what we think of America as being as-a-whole, it would seem that this environment—in which wholesome pride for the Ohio State Buckeyes coincides with alienating experiments in abstraction—speaks closely to reality’s Janus face. This is a world in which you can walk past a sign that says “someone is proud of you” and then immediately enter a building designed by someone who famously compared an architecture student to a monkey in their presentation (“crit”). Tension between these experiences seems pervasive well beyond architecture, which might suggest that buildings still have something to “say” about contemporary reality.