Campus
Ohio State's 1,764 acres (7.14 km2) of main campus is approximately 2.5 miles (4.0 km) north of the city's downtown. Four buildings are currently listed on the National Register of Historic Places: Enarson Hall, Hayes Hall, Ohio Stadium, and Orton Hall. Unlike earlier Ohio state universities such as Ohio University and Miami University, which have beautiful campuses with a consistent architectural style, architecture on the Ohio State campus does not conform to a unifying theme such as Gothic revival or Georgian. Instead, the buildings at Ohio State are a mismatched eclectic mix of traditional, modern and post-modern styles. The William Oxley Thompson Memorial Library, anchoring the western end of The Oval, is Ohio State library's main branch and single largest repository. The Thompson Library was designed in 1913 by the Boston firm of Allen and Collens in the Italianate Renaissance Revival style, and its placement on the Oval was suggested by the Olmsted brothers who had designed New York City's Central Park. In 2006, the Thompson Library began a $100 million dollar renovation with the stated aims of becoming a "global benchmark twenty-first century" library while maintaining the building's classical Italian Renaissance architecture.
Overall, Ohio State operates the 18th largest university research library in North America with a combined collection of over 5.8 million volumes. Additionally, the libraries receive approximately 35,000 serial titles on a regular basis. Its recent acquisitions were 16th among university research libraries in North America. Ohio State's library system encompasses twenty-one libraries located on its Columbus campus. An additional eight branches are located at off-campus research facilities, regional campuses, and a book storage depository near campus. In all, the Ohio State library system encompasses fifty-five branches and specialty collections. Some of the more significant collections include The Byrd Polar Research Center Archival Program containing the Archives of Admiral Richard E. Byrd as well as a significant collection of polar research materials, The Hilandar Research Library which contains the world's largest collection of medieval Slavic manuscripts on microform, The Ohio State Cartoon Library & Museum, which is the world's largest repository of original cartoons, The Lawrence and Lee Theatre Research Institute and the archives of Senator John Glenn.
Anchoring the traditional campus gateway at the eastern end of The Oval is the Wexner Center for the Arts. Designed by architects Peter Eisenman of New York and Richard Trott of Columbus, the center opened in 1989. Its founding was financed in large part by Ohio State alumnus Leslie Wexner with a gift of twenty-five million dollars in the 1980s. The center was founded to be a comprehensive visual arts center encompassing all aspects of visual and performing arts with a focus on new commissions and artist residencies. Part of its design was to pay tribute to the armory that formerly had the same location. Its groundbreaking deconstructivist architecture has resulted in it being lauded as one of the most important buildings of its generation. Its design has also been criticized as proving less than ideal for many of the art installations that it has attempted to display. The centerpiece of The Wexner Center's permanent collection is Picasso's Nude on a Black Armchair, which was purchased by alumnus Leslie Wexner at auction for forty-five million dollars and then donated to the university.
To the south of The Oval is another, somewhat smaller, expanse of greenspace commonly referred to as The South Oval. At its eastern end, it is anchored by the Ohio Union. To the west are Enarson Hall, the Kuhn Honors House, Browning Amphitheatre (a traditional stone Greek theatre) and Mirror Lake. Knowlton Hall, dedicated in October 2004, is located at the corner of West Woodruff Avenue and Tuttle Park Place, adjacent to Ohio Stadium. Knowlton Hall along with the Fisher College of Business and Hitchcock Hall form an academic nucleus in the Northwestern corner of North campus. Knowlton Hall is home to the KSA Café, the disciplines of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, City and Regional Planning, and about 550 undergraduate and graduate students. Knowlton Hall stands out from the general reddish-brown brick of Ohio State's campus with its distinctive white marble tiles that cover the entire exterior of the building. This unique wall cladding was requested by Austin E. Knowlton, the namesake of and main patron to the creation of Knowlton Hall. Knowlton also requested that 5 white marble columns be erected on the site, each column representing one of the classical orders of Architecture.
The Ohio State College of Medicine is located on the southern edge of the central campus. It is home to the James Cancer Hospital, a cancer research institute and one of the National Cancer Institute's forty-one comprehensive cancer centers, along with the Richard M. Ross Heart Hospital, a research institute for cardiovascular disease.
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