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Big-time Architecture in a Small Town
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19031 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1991 |
1,774 Words |
| Author
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Karen S. Chambers
Karen S. Chambers is a craft writer, critic, and curator
currently based in New York. |
"There was no magnificent obsession. There was no group of people that said that one day in 1990 Columbus, Indiana, is going to be ranked fourth in the nation for contemporary architecture. That was never the point. The point was that every community is known for something. So let's let our community be known for the quality of the building and the quality of life that goes on within those buildings." That's how Sarah Northern, director of the Columbus Visitors Center, describes her community, a town of 32,000 that has been called the "Athens of the Prairie" and "a mecca for anyone interested in the development of Modern architecture" (Architectural Record cord, January 1990).
The facts speak for themselves. Columbus has twenty entries in the Guide to U.S. Architecture 1940-1980, assembled by the architectural historians and critics Ester McCoy and Barbara Goldstein. Of the two hundred cities listed in the publication, only New York with thirty-one, Chicago with twenty-six, and Los Angeles with twenty-four have more mentions.
But there must be a reason that this otherwise unremarkable town beats out cities like Washington, San Francisco, and Houston in the area of contemporary architecture. This reason has a name: J. Irwin Miller.
What Miller did, through the Cummins Engine Foundation, was to pick up the tab, either fully or partially, for the architectural fees for twenty-four buildings since 1957. Among these are schools by Edward Larrabee Barnes, Richard Meier, and Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates; fire stations by Venturi and Rauch and Susana Torre; and government buildings by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates (the first post office in the country built by privately paid architects). There are even golf course clubhouses by Harry Weese and Bruce Adams. In addition to these examples, Miller's own family businesses, the Irwin Union Bank and Cummins, have commissioned major architects, including Eero Saarinen, Paul Kennon, Roche, and Weese, to design nine buildings. It is noteworthy that on the Architectural Tour Map, published by the Visitors Center, of the forty-nine modern buildings listed well over half, thirty-three, are the result of Miller's influence.
A Traditional Approach
Miller's interest in architecture first evidenced itself in the late 1930s when he was fresh from Yale and Oxford and back in Columbus to learn the family business. Discussions were under way about a new
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