Word: centering
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...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...
Above all, it was brave of Harling to place at the center of what might otherwise have been an episodic comedy the true, tragic story of his sister, a diabetic who doomed herself to early death in order to bear a child, and his mother's struggle to come to terms with that choice. It gives the piece the dramatic focus and the emotional weight it requires...
...film's center lies in the bond between Julia Roberts as the young woman serenely accepting the risk of childbirth and Sally Field as her tightly wound mother, wanting to scream warnings at her daughter but only able to whisper despairing support for her -- right through the final coma. Their characters are fully and finely realized, and their work is supported, not subverted, by the style and mood of a film that cries more easily, and more persuasively, than it laughs...