Columbus, Indiana, is a mecca of modernism that still embodies the progressive ideals of its founders and star designers. Our writer explores ‘the Athens of the prairie’
Imagine growing up in a place where every stage of your life was framed by the best architecture of its day. You start out in an experimental elementary school, learning on a multi-level landscape of open-plan terraces connected by slides, before moving to a junior school where little towers of classrooms are linked by brightly coloured sloping tunnels. You spend your high school years in a heroic piece of brutalism, attend university in a sleek glass temple and go to church in a space-age tipi.
Your libraries, banks and even the local discount store are all the work of notable architects, and if your house is ever set ablaze, firefighters will come from a famous fire station, designed by a Pritzker prize winner. If you end up in jail, rest assured you will be incarcerated in a work of high postmodernism. And you may even die in a Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired hospital, then have your ashes scattered in the shadow of an Eero Saarinen-designed chapel.
Such a place exists – and it’s situated where you would least expect to find it. Set in the middle of the rolling agricultural plains of Indiana, a landscape dotted with “Farmers for Trump” billboards and White Castle hamburger outposts, the small city of Columbus makes for an unlikely modernist mecca. “Seldom, if ever, has so small a community contained so many examples of innovative architectural achievements,” declared the New York Times in 1970, noting that Columbus had been building at least “two masterpieces a year” since the early 1950s. Locals took to calling it “the Athens of the prairie”, and it’s a reputation the place has continued to uphold ever since.
The city’s many masterpieces, and the fascinating stories behind them, have now been brought together in a hefty tome, American Modern, authored by an architecture writer who grew up here. “I walked past the Saarinen church every day on my way to school,” says Matt Shaw, whose detailed text is accompanied by photographs by Iwan Baan, which celebrate the buildings as well-used backdrops to everyday small-town life. “My high school was actually part of the reason the contemporary architecture programme began,” Shaw adds, “because no one liked it.”
The programme he refers to was initiated by Joseph Irwin Miller, a wealthy industrialist and social reformer, who held an evangelical belief in the power of architecture to improve society. From the 1940s onwards, he worked to transform his family’s business, the Cummins Engine Company, into the world’s largest manufacturer of diesel engines, with $6bn in annual sales. To do so, he had to attract the best engineers from around the world, which, in turn, meant turning Columbus into the “very best community of its size in the country”, with the best schools, staffed by the best teachers, and the best civic buildings and parks, all built with the aim of “attracting good people to Columbus in all capacities”.
The plan wasn’t to turn it into a company town, like the Victorian paternalist visions of Bourneville or Saltaire in the UK. Instead, the city itself was the client, and paid for these public buildings as usual, but the Cummins Engine Foundation covered the architects’ fees – as long as they were selected from a list it provided, of the best designers of the day. “We believe nothing is more expensive than mediocrity,” the foundation stated, “and that good design need not cost any more than bad design.”
