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Columbus, Indiana
Modern love walks beside me, modern love walks on by
Between Cincinnati and Indianapolis is a town unlike any other, at least in North America. Columbus, Indiana (population 39,000) is the home of former IRL driver Tony Stewart (not impressive), the one time home of KFC's Colonel Sanders (ok, a little more impressive) and more works of good modern architecture than any other city, at least per capita (very impressive).
In the rest of the world good architecture is hard to find and often valued even less. The biggest crime of Modernism (but certainly not the its only crime) was that it was easily imitated by untalented people. Columbus got around that by hiring talented architects- both Saarinens, Cesar Pelli, Robert Venturi, I.M. Pei, Kevin Roche, Gunnar Birkets (along with sculptors Henry Moore and Dale Chihuly). The buildings they created are certainly (for the most part) very good, but few are flashy, they all look like they belong there, complementing the context, the town, its people.
This is Eero Saarinen's Irwin Union Bank- downtown, open, clean, Modern, loved.
In 1942, Columbus bravely opened its First Christian Church, designed by Eliel Saarinen (you know, Eero's dad). Unlike anything else in Indiana (if not America), the Church became a loved Modern icon in a time when churches weren't supposed to look anything like this.
This is the front doors, with possibly the coolest door handles of any church ever built.
Looking straight up, another view of the small town Indiana church.
This was Columbus' first taste of big time architecture. By the 1950s Eliel's son Eero had already designed and built the bank, some years later a foundation was established by the town's only big company that offered to pay the architect fees for any public building with the catch that it needed to be an approved, big name architect. The foundation continues such generosity today, still promoting quality over flash, substance over style. There is no Wexner Center or CAC or Frank Gehry in Columbus and it is likely there never will be.
A look inside inside Eliel's Church...
...and then inside Eero's, built twenty (or so) years later. Columbus is really a Saarinen town. Kevin Roche (who inherited Eero Saarinen's firm) and Cesar Pelli (who used to work with him) are heavily represented in Columbus as well, perhaps explaining all that Modernist harmony.
Even Robert Venturi's firehouse (admittedly hated by the local woman at the bookshop) fits in, despite all that complexity and contradiction in his work at that time.
Cesar Pelli's 1973 contribution to the Columbus scene includes this terribly fun (and refreshingly not cute) playground. After thirty years, it's scheduled for some type of (most likely) horrible renovation, a subject hotly contested in Columbus according to that aforementioned friendly woman at the bookshop.
