ONE SMALL CITY – SEVEN NATIONAL HISTORIC LANDMARKS!

Cummins Inc. Irwin Conference Center, formerly Irwin Union Bank and Trust, was designed by Eero Saarinen in 1954, with landscape design by Dan Kiley. It is a low, glass-walled building set in a grove of trees. Unusual domed lights and an open interior creates a large open room and a feeling of openness and friendliness. The modern bank is linked to the 1910 office building and three-story building by a three-story glass arcade, which was designed by Kevin Roche and added in 1973. The striped glass of the arcade is made to help moderate the extremes of temperature a glass building can experience.

• Architectural Digest – Fifteen Landmark Buildings by Architect Eero Saarinen
• See more photos of Saarinen’s Columbus work on Pinterest 

Find out much more about Miller House and Garden HERE.

The Miller House and Garden is the collaborative masterpiece of Eero Saarinen, Alexander Girard, Dan Kiley, and their patrons, J.I. and Xenia Miller.

Travel + Leisure magazine said the “Miller House ranks alongside Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, and Philip Johnson’s Glass House as a hallmark of Modernist design (and) it is surrounded by some of the most beautiful Modernist gardens in the United States, created by landscape architect Dan Kiley.” Read what the press has been saying about Miller House and Garden HERE.

• Find out much more about Miller House and Garden HERE.
• See more photos of Saarinen’s Columbus work on Pinterest 
• Architectural Digest – Fifteen Landmark Buildings by Architect Eero Saarinen
• Find out how Girard made America modern

2700 McKinley Ave, Columbus
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John Carl Warnecke designed McDowell in 1960 as an elementary school with four cluster buildings that had three classrooms each and connecting open-air walkways. The school changed to adult education in 1988 and it was designated a National Historic Landmark by the National Park Service in 1999.

"Warnecke was a prolific architect, known especially for his designs for Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C., and the Kennedy Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery. At one time, his firm, John Carl Warnecke and Associates, was the largest in the United States." – from Architect’s Gravesites, by tour guide Henry Kuehn

Eero Saarinen designed North Christian Church, which was completed in 1964. This is the last building designed by Eero Saarinen before his untimely death on September 1, 1961. Roche Dinkeloo & Associates, the successor architectural firm, completed the building. The sloping roof of this six-sided building blends with the landscaped earth-mound which surrounds it. This low line accentuates the slender 192-foot spire, topped with a gold-leaf cross, which gives its distinctive design. Dan Kiley landscaped the multi-acre site, including the parking lot with parking rooms.

In April 1961, Saarinen wrote, “We have finally to solve this church so that it can become a great building. I feel I have this obligation to the congregation, and as an architect, I have that obligation to my profession and my ideals. I want to solve it so that as an architect when I face St. Peter I am able to say that out of the buildings I did during my lifetime, one of the best was this little church, because it has in it a real spirit that speaks forth to all Christians as a witness to their faith.”

Visitors are welcome to view the interior of this church on weekdays (subject to availability). All guests must check in at the office. Enter from the main parking lot on the east side of the building.

• See a detailed feature page on North Christian Church
• See more photos of Saarinen’s Columbus work on Pinterest 
• Featured in Wired magazine’s list of most epic churches 

333 Second St, Columbus
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Myron Goldsmith of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed the newspaper in 1971 of glass and steel and provided onlookers with a window into the business of communications. The open concept reflects the seven-day newspaper’s role as a central link in the information for the community. Originally, the paper's printing presses could be viewed from the street, as they printed the daily paper. The presses had to be moved to a larger printing plant off of Interstate 65 and south of Columbus.

The Republic was the seventh Columbus structure to be named an historic landmark, The U.S. Interior said, “The Republic is an exceptional work of modern architecture and one of the best examples of the work of Myron Goldsmith, a general partner in the firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and a highly respected architect, architect

Myron Goldsmith said about the building: “If I have a total vision of architecture, it is that the majority of the building should be a structural solution, the most modest solution to the problem that one can find, executed and placed carefully in its setting.”

The building was a linchpin in the redevelopment plan for downtown Columbus in the late 1960s. This plan altered much of the existing downtown area, combining contemporary design with the grandeur of 19th-century architecture.

UPDATES

• The Republic Newspaper has moved their offices near Fairoaks Mall.
• The Indiana University J. Irwin Miller Architecture Program moved into the Republic building in August of 2018. See the program's gallery space.
• View a panorama of the Myron Goldsmith building

AWARDS

• American Institute of Architects Honor Award - 1975
• National Historic Landmark - 2012

Excerpts from the New York Times obituary...

Myron Goldsmith (was) a student both of Mies and of Nervi, two of the century's most important architects, Mr. Goldsmith brought their influence to bear on more than 40 projects he designed around the nation for the firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, where he worked from 1955 to 1983, the last 16 years as a general partner in its Chicago office.

Like Mies, Mr. Goldsmith sought to express the structural essence of his buildings in their exteriors, unmasked by ornament. Like Nervi, he designed with the sweeping arcs and long spans made possible by new technologies. The results were almost sculptural: cool, spare, gleaming and hard-edged.

Mr. Goldsmith's best-known work was the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope Facility of 1962, at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, which draws some 100,000 visitors a year.

Mr. Goldsmith distilled his philosophy in a 1987 monograph: "A building should be built with economy, efficiency, discipline and order."

(He) was disarming in person, almost an antithesis of his architecture; perpetually rumpled, with a bird's-nest tangle of hair and a shy, soft-spoken demeanor. "He managed with gentleness to exist and prosper in a field that is otherwise eaten up by tigerish egos," said Franz Schulze, an art historian and Mies biographer.

Mr. Goldsmith was born in Chicago and graduated in 1939 from the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he studied under Mies, whose Chicago office he joined in 1946. He worked there until 1953, when he received a Fulbright Grant to study under Nervi at the University of Rome.

Other significant projects were the Oakland Alameda County Coliseum of 1966, in California, which includes a circular arena 420 feet in diameter, ringed by a 70-foot-high glass wall behind enormous concrete X-braces; and The Republic newspaper plant in Columbus, Ind., completed in 1971, whose delicate aluminum and glass skin allowed passers-by to view the newsroom and pressroom.

Mr. Goldsmith had been a professor of architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology since 1961.

• Read the full New York Times obituary for Myron Goldsmith