Word: steeling
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that does not mean the building is easy to understand or like. Running its whole, 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...
...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 of architectural structure is nearly kinetic: as you enter, a fake beam shoots past...
What is the point of all this highly wrought architectural scribbling and juxtapositioning? Why, in a single glimpse, is there brick, tinted glass, clear glass, white glass, white metal panels, white steel, white stone, concrete and red stone? Because to pull off such an improbable collage is a virtuoso feat -- Eisenman is like a chess master playing several games at once while standing on his head. Because the dense, dense eclecticism of material and form 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...
...second, equally important feature. Tax rates should be the same on alternative forms of economic activity. If plumbers are taxed more than electricians, there will be fewer plumbers and more electricians than the free market would dictate. If a tax break goes to timber but not to steel, investment flows out of the steel industry and into the timber industry. In either case, the Government is overriding the free market and dictating the shape of the economy just as surely as if it did so directly. Except that doing so directly is called "socialism" (or at least "industrial policy"), whereas...
...also known as the Nimitz Freeway, collapsed when dozens of its concrete vertical support columns shattered during the violent shaking of the earthquake. Steel support rods inside the columns snapped like raw spaghetti under the multimillion-pound weight of the four-lane upper roadway. Some construction experts last week expressed outrage that the steel rods inside the columns had not been reinforced to help them withstand a powerful quake. Said Peter Lehrer, co-chairman of the Lehrer McGovern Bovis construction firm, which managed the restoration of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island: "There is no excuse for what happened...