When a luxurious-looking jail went up here in 1990, T-shirts ridiculed everything its outside seemed to stand for. Instead of bars on its windows, this jail had a brick facade with enough decoration for a wedding cake. It also had an open-air steel dome under which convicted criminals played volleyball. The jail actually had a spartan inside, but its outside seemed to promise crooks all the comforts of a Holiday Inn.
And that is not a message some people here wanted to send.
The T-shirts pictured prisoners hanging out the windows of the postmodern prison, which was designed by Berkeley, Calif., architect Don Hisaka and is officially known as the Bartholomew County Jail. The jailbirds uttered complaints like: “Oh my God, we’re having steak again tonight.” Or: “Oh my, when is my limousine coming?”
The grass-roots reaction against the $7 million prison indicates how seriously Columbus takes its architecture-very seriously indeed. Located 45 miles south of Indianapolis, Columbus (population 31,802) has more distinguished churches, office buildings and schools than cities 20 times its size. This is where modern architecture meets Main Street and the old and the new stand chic to chic, as Time once put it. Even the fire stations have world-class architectural pedigrees.
In 1991, the American Institute of Architects asked its members to rate U.S. cities on the basis of design quality and innovation. Columbus ranked sixth-behind first-place Chicago and other metropolises, but ahead of such eminently livable urban centers as Minneapolis and Portland, Ore.
Those architects who have left their mark on Columbus are responsible for American landmarks such as the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (I.M. Pei of New York City), the World Financial Center in New York City (Cesar Pelli of New Haven, Conn.) and the Time-Life Building in Chicago (Harry Weese of Chicago).
Pei, who designed Columbus’ Cleo Rogers Memorial Libraryof 1969, is one of four winners of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the architectural equivalent of the Nobel Prize, to have built here. The others are Robert Venturi of Philadelphia (who designed the Fire Station No. 4 of 1967), Richard Meier of New York City (the Clifty Creek High School of 1982) and Kevin Roche of Hamden, Conn. (whose six Columbus commissions include the headquarters of Columbus-based Cummins Engine Co., completed in 1983).
True, a recent slowdown in population growth has brought a corresponding decline in construction, a departure from Columbus’ boom days of the ’60s and ’70s. And, yes, there have been lapses into postmodern excess, such as the county jail. But the flame of modern architecture still burns brightly here, as evidenced by the appearance of a contemporary Columbus park in the November issue of Architectural Record, a top American design magazine.
Columbus achieved its eminence by-what else?-design. In 1957, Cummins Engine Co. proposed a unique deal to the local school board. Cummins’ charitable foundation would pay architectural fees for the schools that needed to be built. The catch: The schools were required to select from a list of up-and-coming architects approved by Cummins.
The Weese influence
The first picked was Chicago’s Weese, who did the Lillian C. Schmitt Elementary School of 1957 and went on to complete 10 buildings in Columbus-more than any other architect. (Weese’s output includes other schools, an office building, a church and a golf course clubhouse.)
Since 1957, Cummins’ sponsorship program has been expanded to other public buildings, such as fire stations and the county jail. Cummins has paid the fees for more than 30 commissions, investing at least $10 million on architecture. And the man who dreamed up the sponsorship program, 83-year-old J. Irwin Miller, has been dubbed the Medici of the Midwest.
Miller, former chairman of the Fortune 500 diesel engine manufacturer, notes with pride that Columbus’ taste has become more sophisticated over the years. When the town’s first major contemporary structure, the First Christian Church by Finnish-American Eliel Saarinen, opened in 1942, Miller recalled, residents made comments like, “When are they going to move in the machines?”
The initial product of Cummins’ patronage, the Schmitt Elementary School, is an extraordinary little building. Forgoing the conventional image of the school as a stern, civic temple, Weese gave each of 12 low-slung classrooms its own peaked roofline. The school fit discreetly among neighboring single-family homes and had an almost dollhouse-like scale appropriate for 1st graders.
Delicate and humanistic
It is this scale and concern for context-delicate rather than domineering, humanistic instead of purely rationalistic-that distinguishes the modernism of Columbus from the heroic but often brutal, modern skyscrapers of Chicago. And it is no coincidence that much of the architecture in Columbus was completed by architects, including Saarinen and Weese, who either taught or studied at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. The school has a long tradition of humanistic modernism.
A one-story schoolhouse, of course, is design of a different order than the 110-story Sears Tower, the world’s tallest office building. Yet if Sears and its big-shouldered brethren have led us to believe that modern architecture is incompatible with historical buildings and human scale, the modernism of Columbus bids us to re-examine that premise.
Along downtown Columbus’ main drag, Washington Street, is a one-story glass pavilion designed in 1954 by Eliel Saarinen’s son, Eero, of Bloomfield Hills, Mich. The building, which houses a banking hall of the Irwin Union Bank & Trust Co., is clearly contemporary. Nonetheless, it is in scale and sympathy with the brick Victorian storefronts across the street.
On the edge of downtown is another gentle structure, The Republic newspaper building of 1971 by Myron Goldsmith, a former partner in the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. The pedestrian can peer through the steel and glass walls of this Miesian box and spy a yellow printing press. When the press runs, it resembles kinetic sculpture: great gobs of newsprint spinning through the yellow machine, emerging black and white and ready to be read all over.
The long-term value
The privately funded Republic is one example of how the architectural standards set by Cummins have inspired (or perhaps, goaded) businesses to realize that architecture adds long-term value to a community, even if costs a few bucks more in the short run.
Similarly, churches have followed the lead of the First Christian Church. An example is the North Christian Church of 1964, designed by Eero Saarinen. Its cone-shaped roof and spike-shaped spire have led it to be nicknamed “The Oil Can Church.”
Of course, it takes more to build a community than hiring outstanding architects to design individual structures. If that were enough, then Sunbelt cities such as Houston, with their shiny office towers standing like isolated monuments in a sculpture garden, would qualify as world-class burgs. In contrast, Columbus has recognized the value of good design for the spaces between buildings. For example, many corporations voluntarily have surrounded their parking lots with bushes and greenery, brightening the streetscape.
And the streetscape itself has been revamped as part of an ongoing city effort to keep downtown a vital economic center, despite competition from Wal-Mart and suburban shopping malls.
From 1990 to 1993, 6,000 individuals and businesses took part in a city program to pave downtown Washington Street’s sidewalks with bricks inscribed with personalized messages. (The price per brick: $25 for individuals, $75 for businesses). It is something else to walk along a sidewalk and see the chiseled message “Ashley Sprague-With Love-Dad” appear at your shoe tops.
But Columbus is not Utopia on the prairie. While the downtown is holding its own against the assault of outlying shopping malls, it is hardly booming. There are a few empty storefronts on Washington Street. On Sundays, stores including Zaharako’s, a turn-of-the-century ice cream parlor that serves up banana splits and sundaes from two Mexican onyx soda fountains, are closed for business. “The sidewalks roll up,” says one of the proprietors.
In addition, the architectural legacy of recent years has been spotty. The modern City Hall by San Francisco architect Charles Bassett, completed in 1981, has a pair of brick-faced steel cantilevers hovering over its monumental staircase. It seems better suited to a metropolis of 3 million, not a country town of 30,000.
An expansion of the Bartholomew County Hospital, completed this year by the Ralph Lauren of American architecture, Robert A.M. Stern of New York City, is a postmodern pastiche of Prairie and California styles.
Those familiar with the design scene in Columbus say the uneven design record can be ascribed in part to conservative clients, who were more inclined to hire established talents than rising stars. But, these insiders say, the record also appears to reflect the ebbing influence of J. Irwin Miller and the rising clout of his son, Will, who is said to be more open to postmodernism than his father.
Back to the future
Still, there are signs that Columbus is returning to its modernist roots. An example is Mill Race Park, just west of downtown along the White River. It was redeveloped in 1992, commemorating the 500th anniversary of the voyage to America by the city’s namesake.
Teaming with Cambridge, Mass., landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh, San Francisco architect Stanley Saitowitz has designed toylike, red objects along the roadway of the 85-acre park, including a boathouse, a picnic shelter, and a men’s room pavilion topped by red steel in the shape of an “M.” The steel above the women’s room resembles a “W.”
The project appears in the November issue of Architectural Record, which notes that, among architects, Columbus “is so famous that getting a commission there, no matter what size, is considered an honor.”
Reinforcing the return to modernism, townspeople reacted strongly this year against Venturi’s proposal for a Las Vegas-style pedestrian walkway that would have crossed the main highway on the outskirts of town.
The walkway, proposed for a location just east of Interstate Highway 65, was supposed to be a populist, postmodern gateway for Columbus, relating to the signs of franchise hotels and fast-food joints on the commercial strip. It also was supposed to alert drivers on the interstate to the town’s extraordinary ensemble of architecture.
But residents rejected Venturi’s design, saying they wanted a gateway to project the sleek, modern image of downtown-not something that resembled McDonald’s golden arches. “Some guy had a bad night and came up with that one,” said Barbarba Marsh, who owns a downtown cosmetics store.
The outcry forced city officials to unveil an alternative last summer: a sleek, structurally advanced bridge that will carry north-south traffic on I-65 across a six-lane east-west highway.
Complete federal funding still has to be secured for the arched bridge, which was designed by J. Muller International of Chicago and would cost about $15 million. The design appears to be popular, but some townspeople say they would rather spend the money on social problems, including homelessness. “Why do you have to put all that money out there (on the interstate)?” asks a jeweler on Washington Street.
Such is the fate of a town dedicated to going forward by design. Says Sarah Busch, director of the Columbus Visitors Center, which runs architectural bus tours and attracts an estimated 50,000 people a year: “There’s always controversy when you push the envelope.”
