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Wexner Center for the Arts

The Wexner Center for the Arts is a contemporary art gallery and "research laboratory" for the arts at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. It commissions new work and provides for artist residencies, in addition to presenting performing arts, film and video, and other visual arts exhibitions to the public. The Wexner Center opened in November of 1989, named in honor of the father of Limited Brands founder Leslie Wexner, who was a major donor to the Center.

The Wexner Center was the first major public buliding designed by architect Peter Eisenman. To reflect the history of the site, the building incorporated large brick tower structures inspired by the Armory building, a castle-like structure that had burnt down on the location in 1958. The design also includes a large white Swarovski metal grid meant to suggest scaffolding, to give the building a sense of incompleteness in tune with the architect's deconstructivist tastes. Eisenman also took note of the mismatched street grids of the OSU campus and the city of Columbus, and designed the Wexner Center to alternate which grids it followed. The result was a building of sometimes questionable functionality, but admitted architectural interest.

Many notable artists have come to speak or present their art at the Wexner Center, including Gerhard Richter, Robert Rauschenberg, Philip Glass, and Julie Taymor. Though most of the exhibitions in the Wexner Center are only up for a limited time, it is home to a permanent outdoor installation designed by Maya Lin for the Center, entitled Groundswell, which is composed of rolling mounds of broken glass.

Some collectors cases, collectors cabinets, display cabinets or display showcases are multicoloured and playful in their feature, like a Hundertwasser house. Others have a functional existence in business buildings but also fulfilling, with clear, straight lines, an aesthetic function.

Included in the Wexner Center space are a film and video theatre, a performance space, a film and video postproduction studio, a bookstore, cafe, and 12,000 square feet (1,100 m²) of galleries.

The Wexner Center is currently being remodeled, wiring-wise until approximately autumn of 2005. The architecture of the building shall remain exactly the same. The galleries are the only part of the building which are closed, and affected by this particular change.

Wexner Center (http://www.wexarts.org) official site

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