Word: grid
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...work in the autumn of 1911. Pop art is born in the letters, headlines and brand names they stenciled and glued onto their surfaces. Constructivist sculpture descends from Braque's paper constructions and Picasso's tin guitar. Abstract Expressionism gets its originality from its struggle to "escape the Cubist grid" -- which was never a grid anyway. Cubism, from this simplified and patristic standpoint, becomes the tree in the primal garden of modernism, and Picasso and Braque its Adam...
...clean edges and began to work thickly in oils instead of acrylic. The grid of Scully's paintings in the '80s speaks of two things: a desire for large order and a sense of impending slippage, as though the columns and lintels of paint had to be constantly tested, as though their pinning could come apart just as the painter turned his back. They are not smoothly designed but look somewhat improvised, like the sides of large huts. They are very "New York" paintings, but the city they evoke is not the foreigner's imagined grid of perfect planes; rather...
...little like The Wizard of Oz played backward. British journalist Tony Parker gets caught up in a brainstorm with his editor and is blown from batty Albion into the middle of humdrum Kansas. There, in Dorothy's native land, he finds not a winding yellow brick road but a grid of blacktop highways crossing one another at predictable right angles. Instead of tin men and cowardly lions, there is a pride of stolid citizens unashamed of their placid routines and quick with the thank-yous and have-a-nice-days. Wicked witches? Nope, but there is a local drunk...
Even more ambitious is the Urban Geo Grid proposed by Shimizu Corp. It would be an immense network of subterranean atriums connected by tunnels and filled with such facilities as offices, gymnasiums, libraries, exhibition halls and public baths. The project would be built 164 ft. below the ground, sprawl across 485 sq. mi. and accommodate 500,000 people. Not only would temperature and humidity be controlled, say the planners, but real sunlight would be reflected in through vents from the surface. Estimated cost: $80.2 billion...