Published August 2006
On a stretch of road in Columbus, Indiana, sandwiched between a Kohl's megabox hardware store and a Johnny Carino's Italian Country Kitchen, there's one of the most simple—and simply sublime—structures to have been built in the U.S. in recent memory. It might seem an unlikely location for such a picture of high modernism, for a return to what the building's architect, Deborah Berke, calls the "clean, strong, quiet" qualities of modernist architecture, but it's not. In fact, this town is one of the last remaining strongholds of architecture that, while often fabulous, just doesn't quite fit in anywhere else.
Columbus, Indiana, was chartered in 1864, and remained a steadily growing Midwestern town without much to offer by way of distinguishing it from any of the other steadily growing Midwestern towns until the success of the Cummins Diesel Engine Company, founded--in a garage, according to family lore--by Joseph Ireland Irwin in 1919 began influencing the town, and its growth. And while the seeds for Columbus' eventual future as a hothouse of modernist American architecture were sown with the 1942 construction of Eliel Saarinen's First Christian Church, it wasn't until the Cummins Foundation Architecture Program was founded in 1957 that the garden started growing.
The program came together, gradually, in response to a community outcry over a school constructed quickly, cheaply, and terribly, as a last-ditch response to the overwhelming number of baby-boomers desperate for their ABCs. Cummins began having trouble recruiting engineers (fearful of relocation lest their children grow up stupid), and approached the school board, offering to pay the architect's fee so long as the board hired an architect J. Irwin Miller, Joseph Ireland's grandson and then-CEO of Cummins, approved of. Modernist Harry Weese was hired and the Lillian C. Schmitt school opened to such happy students and happier parents that the school board requested another, similarly funded, school. Miller agreed, but not before realizing that this altruism-couched business-savvy support could get a little out of hand unless a formal program was instituted.
As laid out then, and as it stands now, the Program pays the architects' fees for approved public projects, including hospitals, courtrooms, and schools. Buildings by architects like the pomo-inflected Robert A.M. Stern , the spacecraft-inspired John M. Johansen, and the bread-and-butter-modernist James Stewart Polshek, have all been funded by the Program, which current Irwin Financial CEO (and great-great-grandson of Cummins Founder Joseph Ireland Irwin) William Miller points out has had a follow-on effect. Of the sixty-odd buildings on the official Columbus architecture tour, only half have been funded by the program. The rest, including the SOM-designed Republic newspaper offices, the Eero and Eliel Saarinen churches, and an Eero Saarinen-designed bank, Irwin Union's first foray into architecture, were funded solely by the clients. But it's this domino effect started by the emphasis on quality public buildings that, even though this latest project was private, Berke argues is what sets Columbus apart from the flash-in-the-pan Bilbao effect so many other towns find when they turn to architecture in the search for economic salvation.
"The thing about Columbus is that these commissions worked by significant architects are kind of regular buildings," Berke says. "They're not museums. They're not the current 'cool, gotta have it' buildings." Instead, she points out, the capital-A Architecture of Columbus is found in the fire stations, the police stations, the elementary schools, the churches. And in an architectural climate in which small towns believe in the ultimate power that a big architect brings, often to find themselves in much the same dreary economic situation they were in before, taking such an ultra-pragmatic approach is remarkable, and refreshing. There are no glass-fronted Richard Meier-designed County Courthouses (as in Islip, New York), no Frank Gehry-designed George Ohr Museums (as in Biloxi, Mississippi), no Tadao Ando-designed modern art museums (as in Fort Worth, Texas). Here, in Columbus, there is a Robert Venturi fire station close to an I.M. Pei library that sits just a short drive from a Robert A.M. Stern hospital. And it is here, in this environment, that Deborah Berke, a modernist architect struggling to make her place in an architectural climate that, as she says, is so much about the "sex symbol on the skyline," has found her place.
The Irwin Union Bank building is a two-note structure. The base, clad in brick and on a perpendicular axis to the main drag, is a well-proportioned, window-lined rectangle in plan and box in section. On top of the base, about a third of the way back when seen from the street, sits a translucent glass box with the words Irwin Union Bank slipped on, facing the road. In a world of signage, this one's a doozy. And that's precisely the point: to call attention the bank, nothing else. Because as enticing as the space up top looks, as light-filled and sublime, it's completely empty, save for a few fluorescent lights. Empty, but hardly useless.
"I grew up with drive-through banking," project architect Mark Leff says, explaining the reason for giving such architectural attention to the canopied drive-through lanes the glass box creates. For him, paying as much attention to the architecture of the drive-through as to the architecture of the interior equalizes the two formerly separated customer groups. And in an environment that's all about money, while money is all about division, it's a bold move. And an (even historically) important one.
In Berke's interview with Will Miller, they discussed the founding of the Irwin Union Bank (in the back of a store, in the only safe in town), and the sense of equality his family's company had tried to foster. "It should never be polarizing, or look down on anyone," Berke remembers Miller describing of his Big Idea for the bank, conceptually. Architecturally, that translates into a bare concrete floor, white walls, pale wood counters, and gray carpeting. The biggest visual design motions are the rows of safety-deposit boxes--their tarnished shininess having almost the same effect as wallpaper--and the Noguchi lamps, usually the most minimal object in a room, but here the most decorative.
Berke found it natural to slip into this egalitarian attitude. "I used to joke in lectures that it was tough being the poster child for anonymity," she says, dryly examining the way her work is so often (she thinks wrongly) interpreted. "The truth is that my work isn't anonymous, it's just really understated." After twenty minutes in the bank's main room, it becomes increasingly clear that she's absolutely on point. The building holds up under scrutiny. Every angle, every turn, every proportion, is interrelated, and impeccable. It's the quietness with which everything is executed that slips the building into the modernist camp, as opposed to the minimalist, which Berke describes as far more aggressive. "Minimalism has this kind of strident 'I'm so stripped down that I'm tougher than you' attitude," she explains. "Modernism, with a small m, means that there's nothing extraneous." The bank almost dares the visitor to try and find something unnecessary, something extra, and the closest it comes are the slightly off-kilter faucets in the breakroom kitchen. Other than that, it's spotless.
Despite the bank's having been privately funded, it's clear that the attitudes behind it, and indeed those that govern the construction of virtually every architecturally distinguished structure in Columbus, can be traced back to the Program and its intentions. Columbus has become a town that invites architectural tourism without fetishizing architecture, that warrants closer attention without requiring excessive analysis. And while on a recent March day there was virtually no one on the sidewalks save a (heavily) pregnant fifteen-year-old, it's clear that the people that inhabit Columbus live, breathe, and use their architecture, constantly aware of what it's doing for them but never stepping into self-conscious territory. There will always be social problems (the Midwestern methamphetamine phenomenon), and it will always be harder to find a fancier meal than the peanut-littered Texas Roadhouse offers, but the backdrop against which the seventh-graders hide and smoke and the tenth-graders have their Friday night dates is one of important architecture. These buildings won't solve the town's problems, but they put Columbus onto the map, and reality onto Architecture.
