The town’s reputation among architects took off in the mid-1950s, when its largest employer, the engine manufacturer Cummins, began covering the architecture fees for new modernist public schools through the Cummins Foundation Architecture Program (CFAP) — so long as the school board picked an architect from a list of modernists provided by J. Irwin Miller, who was then Cummins’ chairman and CEO. The foundation eventually expanded to cover the fees for any publicly funded facility in town.

One Columbus native has now written the first monograph on the buildings that make Columbus a modernist mecca. American Modern: Architecture; Community; Columbus, Indiana by architecture writer Matt Shaw presents the town of 50,000 people as a postwar vision for a better city — which came about during a time when the federal government, corporate leaders and civil rights activists in the 1960s transformed US cities with mixed results.

Through Shaw’s extensive research, photographs by Iwan Baan and graphic design by Studio Lin, American Modern is an overdue tribute to Columbus’s architecture. It also manages to connect the town’s evolution with the political, economic and social changes occurring throughout the postwar US. Bloomberg CityLab recently spoke with Shaw and Landmark Columbus Foundation founding executive director Richard McCoy to learn more about their town’s enduring embrace of a distinctly American form of modernism.

Bloomberg CityLab: In American Modern, you refer to Columbus as a “Little Great Society.” How did Columbus’ version of the Great Society compare to the federal government’s vision?

Matt Shaw: The community as a whole was able to reach a broad consensus, which was a big part of the Great Society and the process that they were trying to instill. Columbus did that really well with a coalition that wasn’t just diverse in terms of ethnicity and religion but also economic class. The War on Poverty was a big thing in the Great Society. Columbus took some of the ideas from it, including the idea that everyone could be lifted up by institutions and a strong public-private coalition. The schools they built are a strong example of that. There were kids living in rural areas but attending new schools that looked like they were from Manhattan. This wasn’t a New Deal approach, with jobs programs and a distribution of wealth, but instead about qualitative ways of helping everybody better themselves and creating a society that everybody can live in.

Across America, urban renewal often involved the demolition of lower-income neighborhoods to make way for new expressways and silver bullet redevelopments. Was it different in Columbus?

Shaw: Urban renewal came there just as it did everywhere else. But Columbus was a majority-white city, so they didn’t have some of the same racial issues although they were acutely aware of the racial implications of it all. It was about the East Coast ideals of the Great Society, of good governance, coming to help tear down the slums. Most people consider it to be an overall success, especially the Commons Mall. But there were also families that had been there for 100 years who were forced to sell. It was a miniature urban renewal and not nearly as violent as elsewhere, but it still had some of the underlying tensions every other city had.

How was Columbus able to maintain its architectural ambitions with the wave of economic and cultural changes that swept through the country in the 1970s? What kind of pushback was there against east coast elites building so much in town?

Shaw: We called the book American Modern because Columbus weirdly tracks with the country’s history in that period, and its architecture is such a glaring manifestation of that. It avoided some of the pitfalls of a heavy-handed midcentury modern city. One of the best examples of local feedback making a better project is the First Baptist Church, which was originally supposed to be a crazy sculptural concrete building. The people in the church didn’t like it — they wanted brick and slate, or stone. Harry Weese went back to the drawing board and made what most people think is one of the nicest buildings in town, partly because of its softness.

With Miller and the CFAP, the process was very modulated between the top-down and bottom-up. He deferred to the building committees and knew how to share power. When it was his own project, like his house, it was a very different story.

The Parkside School is a good example of a very simple modular building system its architects, The Architects Collaborative, had developed. The schools started to get more ambitious and radical in the mid- to late-’60s with megastructures and Brutalism. At Fodrea Elementary School, its architect Paul Kennon did charrettes with the children and the community for a design that ended up incorporating a space frame and was programmed to welcome the community after school hours. It was as modern as could be. Some of the schools got a little wacky by the late ’60s. I love them, but the open plan schools were controversial and maybe rubbed people the wrong way. In 1974, the school board rejected the CFAP for the first time while planning for a new facility.

Some of the newer buildings around town were more rooted in different theories of cybernetics, open plans and larger ideas about urbanism. César Pelli’s idea for the Commons as a glass-enclosed structure came from a time when radical thinking envisioned future cities all under glass, like Buckminster Fuller’s domes over Manhattan. But everything in Columbus happened on a small scale and pragmatically. Miller wanted to get the best thinking of the time.

After Taylorsville, the CFAP wasn’t asked again until 1982 to pay for an architecture grant. Things slowed down but Postmodernism was still happening, and in the ’90s there was an attempt to design a commercial highway strip with the help of Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates.

Richard McCoy: Michael Van Valkenburgh’s Mill Race Park was built in 1992 and marks a transition for the town as it was one of the last projects that Miller was deeply involved with. Miller died in 2004, his wife Xenia died in 2008, and by 2009, the family’s banking business was also lost. A lot of people in town were wondering if things could continue.

What does the current era of preserving and adapting modernism look like in Columbus?

McCoy: The Miller family’s home opened to the public in 2011, marking a transition for Columbus without any of the Millers in town. Local leadership was able to convince Indiana University to launch a graduate program in architecture, which is now inside the former Republic Newspaper building by Myron Goldsmith. The Irwin Union Bank and Trust had always commissioned a designer to make a new branch in the county. With the banking enterprise being lost and the industry transition to online banking, those buildings had to find new uses. The best example is the one Harry Weese designed in 1961, which was turned into a coffee shop in 2021. Our organization helped raise $3.2 million for the First Christian Church’s clock tower, and we're working on the conversion of Eero Saarinen’s North Christian Church into a branch library.

Columbus relies on incentives and a community-based approach. There really aren’t any policies in place. There’s no historic preservation committee, no city-run landmarks committee like you see in Chicago or New York. Columbus has never had a historic preservation commission even though they’re quite common around Indiana.

What are some new projects that you believe are continuing the legacy of great, innovative architecture in Columbus?

Shaw: Two buildings that have been announced recently stand out to me and fit into Columbus’s architectural lineage. One is the air traffic control tower by Marlon Blackwell. He does a lot of work in the rural parts of the US using cheaper materials inventively. And he’s one of America’s best architects, so it just makes sense that he would do something in Columbus. There’s also the new school, Westside Elementary, which will be designed by the Boston-based Höweler+Yoon.

McCoy: Both of those projects were funded by the CFAP, which is a key part of this whole story. There was also Moravec Hall at Ivy Tech Community College, a $30 million project designed by San Francisco-based IwamotoScott and completed in 2022. That’s three significant projects funded by the CFAP, continuing such a big part of this whole story that began in the ’50s. Our organization is involved with redesigning Van Valkenburgh’s Downtown Entrance Plaza. Landscape architecture firm Merritt Chase is doing a really innovative community engagement for that now. And with the fifth cycle of Exhibits Columbus, we now have nearly ten years of doing contemporary art and architecture in the city. It’s the start of a culture shift, it’s different from what was happening at the peak of the ‘60s and ‘70s, maybe more community-engaged. I’m really optimistic about where it can go.

Is there anything out of Columbus’s postwar story that cities today can learn from and apply in their own way?

Shaw: A project doesn't have to be expensive. All these buildings were done at or below the state average cost because good architects are clever and can make more out of less. A lot of these buildings are built out of CMU blocks and off-the-shelf metal trusses. They’re not extravagant, but they’re designed by extremely talented architects who were able to do things cheaply. You see that still today with Marlon Blackwell and SO-IL, a firm that participated in Exhibit Columbus. Mr. Miller knew who the best architects were, he knew who to bring in. It sounds simple but it can be difficult to tap into these networks.

McCoy: Columbus is faced with many of the challenges that a lot of cities are facing across post-pandemic America, and figuring out how to attract the next generation of people who want to be invested in the community. Things are happening, interesting architecture is being built. The lesson for other places is that process and getting people in the room matters a lot. Columbus’s quest for excellence in the pursuit of a better place to live is worth paying attention to. Don’t just look at the answer that’s closest to you. Push beyond and find the very best people to work on any aspect of your city.