Columbus, Indiana, is just another bucolic Midwestern town with the usual strip malls and chain restaurants. Quite unexpectedly, it also happens to have one of the country’s most prized collections of buildings by modern masters.
The standard architectural tour of Columbus, Indiana, starts at the visitors center on Fifth Street, an 1864 home with a 1995 addition by Kevin Roche, 1982 winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. It sits next door to the library by I.M. Pei, 1983 Pritzker winner, and across from the First Christian Church by Eliel Saarinen, designated a National Historic Landmark in 2001 as “one of the first Modern religious buildings in America.”
But if you want to see how contemporary design fits within the Columbus of today, a better place to begin is on Tenth Street near Marr Road. There you’ll find a new branch of the Irwin Union Bank designed by architect Deborah Berke of New York: a study in precise minimalism where a nine-and-a-half-foot high and 20-foot-wide box of structural channel glass forms a translucent bridge above the drive-through lanes to an office that’s a cube of subdued brown brick. It may be the most refined bank branch in the world—and it sits on a commercial strip that begins with a Wal-Mart and ends with an Italian chain restaurant housed in a mock Tuscan villa that looks like it arrived by way of Las Vegas.
“That’s Columbus in a nutshell,” says planning director Jeff Bergman, with a grin. “We have our elements of sophistication, and there are just as many people who think a monster truck rally is a good thing.”
Architectural purists might cringe, but Bergman’s right: The 39,000 residents of Columbus find nothing incongruous in the notion that their small city is both a modernist mecca and Anywhere U.S.A. The classics that draw tourists are venerated, and striking new works such as Berke’s bank are still on the rise. But as residents of this city 43 miles south of Indianapolis search for ways to revive their downtown, they also see potential development sites in land covered by the work of highly lauded architects. And in a city renowned for its arch-itecture, design guidelines don’t even exist.
“My colleagues in other cities find themselves debating architecture standards, but the discussion in Columbus is a lot different,” says Bergman, who’s been in his post two years. “They’ll call asking me for our guidelines, and I don’t have anything to give them.”
Modern architecture gained a foothold in Columbus thanks to J. Irwin Miller, alumnus of Yale and Oxford, moderate Republican, longtime head of Cummins Engine Co. and the family (Irwin) bank. It was Miller, the story goes, who nudged his mother to call Eliel Saarinen down from the Cranbrook Academy to design a new home for the church to which the family belonged. And when the fast-growing city needed to build schools in the 1950s, Miller said Cummins would pay the design fees if officials agreed to select an architect from a list prepared by Cummins’s foundation.
That offer still holds—and 48 public projects later, Cummins has written checks to a roster of architects ranging from Robert Venturi (a fire station) and Richard Meier (an elementary school) to James Polshek (a public health facility) and Edward Charles Bassett of Skidmore Owings & Merrill (the city hall). The pace slowed as Columbus matured, but Boston architect William Rawn designed a firehouse that opened in 1998—it’s an amiably abstract riff on a barn—and a middle school by the Chicago firm Perkins+Will is now under construction.
Miller, who died in 2004 at the age of 95, wasn’t just another rich guy with an edifice complex. Far from it. Decades before Richard Florida began touting the gospel of the creative class, Miller understood the wisdom of nurturing a well-rounded community where intelligent people wouldn’t mind settling down.
He summed up his philosophy at the 1964 opening of a Cummins-funded project that tourists rarely visit but locals still cherish, a golf course designed by Robert Trent Jones: Columbus should be “the very best community of its size in the country… a community that isopen in every single respect to persons of every race, color and opinion; that makes them feel welcome and at home here.”
Forty-two years later, Columbus has a stable and self-contained prosperity that’s rare in today’s America. There’s no obvious blight; downtown may be sluggish, but it hasn’t emptied out like so many other small-town centers. Without the crutch of being either a suburb or a college town, Columbus stands on its own just fine.
Architecture is part of the reason: As many as 10,000 people a year pay $10 to take a two-hour bus tour led by volunteers, who first take a 12-hour course on how the civic landscape came to be. Other guests pay $2 for the self-guided tour map. Local architecture is featured on refrigerator magnets, T-shirts, videos, souvenir pencils, and coffee mugs—many bearing the city’s official slogan, “Different by Design.” Still, an outsider who hits town expecting a black-clad oasis is off the mark. Yes, inside the glassy pavilion of the main branch of the Irwin Union Bank—an Eero Saarinen masterpiece from 1954 that would do Mies van der Rohe proud—a plaque proclaims its National Historic Landmark status as “an important work in the development of modernism.” But when you step inside the Kevin Roche–designed addition next door, the worker who walks by is wearing a sweater decorated with cute little lambs. You see the same collision of high design and Middle America when driving through Columbus’s soft terrain, its canopy of trees soon giving way to farmland. Look beyond the Hollywood Video on National Road, and there’s Eero Saarinen’s North Christian Church, with its impossibly deft 192-foot-high spire. The red arch by Jean Muller that marks Columbus’s presence on I-65 is preceded by a Holiday Inn with fake Western storefronts.
But after 50 years, it all works out: The collision is the context. In Columbus—perhaps more than anywhere else in America—modern architecture has proved it can be a good neighbor. While some buildings are better than others, none are abrasive or antisocial in the way that detractors once claimed. And the presence of thoughtful 20th-century design has left an imprint on Columbus residents who would never think of living in a house with a flat roof.
Certainly that’s the experience of William Rawn. His recent work includes a much-acclaimed residential tower at Northeastern University, yet he considers his fire station near an industrial park on the south side of Columbus to be one of his best buildings.
“Working there was incredibly satisfying,” Rawn says. He recalls exactly two design requests. The mayor wanted glass walls perpendicular to the street so residents could see there were fire trucks inside, and firefighters wanted spacious quarters to rest in during the 24-hour shifts. “There were serious questions, but no second-guessing,” Rawn recalls. “The earnestness of the people really impressed me…. I grew to love them for their respect for what architects did.”
That is J. Irwin Miller’s legacy in Columbus: He genuinely believed serious architecture could improve the civic realm. And the results are such that residents remain open to the idea—whatever their own personal tastes might be.
GOODBYE, COLUMBUS?
Here’s how long big-name architecture has been in Columbus: Some of it may be torn down in the name of progress. The most likely candidate is a post office by Kevin Roche from 1970 that fills a block just off Washington Street, the city’s traditional main drag. But many storefronts now are filled with offices or community programs, and Columbus leaders are intrigued by the sort of mixed-use projects that other cities have used to lure people downtown.
“There are buildings in Columbus that helped shape our architectural reputation but don’t fit into the community vision of its future,” says Tom Vujovich, president of the city’s redevelopment commission. “Downtown today is an 8-to-5 existence, and we want it to be more.”
Even if this means demolishing the work of a Pritzker Prize winner? But consider: the city of Columbus has four other buildings by Roche, a favorite of J. Irwin Miller. Nor is the post office a bureaucratic jewel. Meeting the street with massive columns covered in salt-glazed tiles that match the Cor-ten steel roof, it’s a leaden exercise in funereal pomp. As far back as 1976, Chicago Tribune architecture critic Paul Gapp dismissed it as “a grim, oppressive building that would be ugly in any setting.”
Downtown’s enclosed shopping mall is also on the long-term endangered list—even though it’s by Cesar Pelli, one of the nation’s best-known architects. The Commons is a two-block complex developed in 1973 by Irwin Management Co. It has its good points, such as an enclosed public plaza that gets heavy use in winter, but except for the Sears at the back of the mall, most storefronts are empty. And the design—a long shoe box cloaked in brown glass—is about as alluring as it sounds. The downtown strategic plan approved by the city last year that calls for developing the post-office block also suggests “redefining” the Commons as a dining and lifestyle retail destination.
So far, there haven’t been complaints locally about thinning out the stock of high-profile buildings that put Columbus on the architectural map in the first place.
“I think it’s progress,” says architect Nolan Bingham, whose work includes a discreet addition to the First Christian Church. “There are only a few buildings that will last a truly long time.”
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