Wexner Centre for the Arts
Architect: Peter Eisenman
Location: Ohio, USA.
Completed: 1988

Described by New York Times critic Paul Goldberger as 'The Museum That Theory Built,' the Wexner Centre for the Arts was - and still is - one of the purest representations of deconstructive theory in architecture.

The building houses Ohio State University's multidisciplinary international laboratory for the exploration and advancement of contemporary art.

Photo: © Brad Feinknopf

Peter Eisenman, the museum's designer, had spent much of his career distilling architectural form down to a theoretical science - and has collaborated with the post-structuralist thinker Jacques Derrida. This, the first major public work of Eisenman's career, was hightly anticipated when it opened in 1989 and, though it received criticism and plaudits in almost equal measure, the building introduced many of the familiar tropes of deconstructivism, such as the fragmenting of forms, that came to define so much of the avant garde architecture of the late 20th and early 21 century.