Fun fact: There are two small U.S. cities that have an extreme affinity for modernist architecture. One is our dear New Haven.
The other is Columbus, Indiana. And it’s giving New Haven a run for its modern title. This is how.
During the second half of the 20th century, Yale’s architecture school joined forces with Mayor Richard “Dick” Lee, who was fond of scorched earth urban renewal. Lee never saw a grant from the department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) he didn’t like: When Yale built Louis Kahn’s Art Gallery in the early 1950s, a tide of modernism rose in a little New England city, spurred on by the Yale Architecture School. Successive modernist and post modernist architects from Paul Rudolph, to Charles Moore, to Cesar Pelli all built what they taught and brought in teachers who did the same.
Kahn, Eero Saarinen, Marcel Breuer, Kevin Roche and many others made “statement” buildings all about a little city – so many that the New Haven Preservation Trust created a website which will eventually have 100 exemplars of modern architectural beauty.
But New Haven isn’t alone. There is a parallel universe to this city’s architectural novelty: Columbus, Indiana.
Instead of a rampaging urban renewalist mayor or an ivy league pivot to a new age, Columbus had a diesel engine manufacturer, the Cummins Engine, who had a patron leader in Irwin Miller. Miller was a mod champion: he saw Saarinen build a church there in 1942 and then used the architect to build his home in the 1950s. After that, he helped create a foundation that donates the architect’s fees for public building design. These architects have included Cesar Pelli, Skidmore Owings and Merrill, Robert Venturi & Denise Scott Brown, Kevin Roche – quite akin to New Haven’s list of architectural contributors.
Now, the two cities have agreed to use DOCOMOMO—the international celebrator of modernism — to create a modernist smackdown. Watch your newsfeed, this website and the New Haven Preservation Trust for how and when this mod madness will happen!
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Nice article, but you missed a critical connection linking Columbus, New Haven, and Irwin Miller: YALE. As noted in Miller's obituary in The New York Times of 8/19/2004, "Mr. Miller became interested in modern design as an undergraduate at Yale." Miller (Yale Class of 1931) later served as a member of the Yale Corporation, (its governing board of directors). Architect Eero Saarinen, whom you mention, received his Fine Arts degree (in Architecture) from Yale in 1934. While someone may wish to investigate whether Miller and Saarinen had contact with each other from their early adult years at Yale, it seems quite likely that the teaching of architecture at Yale in the late 1920s and 1930s was the nucleus for what is described as occurring in New Haven and Columbus in later decades.