Nearly three decades old, Eisenman's (still laser-less) Greater Columbus Convention Center revisited

2019-01-09T14:35:00-05:00

With full theatrical trappings—nu-age Philip Glass music, smoke machines, mood lighting--the Eisenman team unveiled to the crowd a scale model of the building, which produced a light show to rival a Laser Floyd spectacular. These dozen red-hued Death Star beams [...] were to be placed on the building and neighboring structures, flashing, blinking, sweeping across downtown like some insane city-scale laser security system. Three years later, it was opened. Sans lasers.

Nathan Eddy, architecture documentary director and most recently a driving force to save Philip Johnson and John Burgee’s AT&T Building in New York, pens a delightful review of Peter Eisenman's 1990 competition-winning proposal for the Greater Columbus Convention Center in Columbus, Ohio.

"Forget the Bilbao Effect—today’s clients demand the Instagram Effect, with architects all but forced to include social media experiences into their designs," writes Eddy. "In 2018, a quarter century feels like forever ago, and Eisenman’s building, with its peculiar colors, slanted walls and cocky posturing, is still somehow both out of and ahead of its time, a futuristic anachronism."

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Nearly three decades old, Eisenman's (still laser-less) Greater Columbus Convention Center revisited