Pound for pound, brick for brick, glass curtain for glass curtain there is not a single city in the entire U.S. this progressive, and cutting edge, and risk taking with architectural design and engineering as Columbus, IN is.
This town is/was? like an incubator, a test ground for architectural innovation.



Having said all that, has anything new, and exciting been built there in the last 10 years?

Yeah, does anyone out there have any pics of Columbus? I would like to go down there myself and take some if not.

There is a great tour book out there, pocket size, i'll have to look for it.
It would be neat to see all the bldgs. together on one thread.

I've lived in Indiana and visited all of its major cities, but have never been to Columbus. And I'm sure that I'm not alone in that aspect. Pictures would be a great help to us ;)

http://www.indiana.edu/%7Eradiotv/wtiu/columbus/index.html

This link on the Indiana U. site provides an interactive timeline to some
of Columbus, IN's landmark architecture. Columbus, IN is sort of the US
version of Brasilia, Brazil, a place for architects to experiment.

everytime i visit columbus... i get the chills.... like its a very small city...but there churches are amazing....(when i say churches i mean like they are gorgeous..like people think columbus has office buildings.(that is what i thought i was like where is the city at).. all of there buildings are churches..except the irving building and a couple of banks.. but they are really known for there churches)..... they are effing amazing.. my aunt and uncle lives there .... and i stayed there with them a couple of times... and i went with them to church... they built like this 7 million dollar church..its almost brand spanking new when i went there...... and you talk about an orgasm..... hahah omg.. it was so adorable.....i was like 7 million dollars well spent.....and they have the cutest downtown you have ever seen.... and it was gorgeous.. i am going to see if i can get down there sometime again... and take pictures... i am going to indy this weekend probably i am going to see if i can drive down 65 and see columbus.. dont' hold me on it.... but if you have never seen columbus indiana.. you need to..really!

Columbus is interesting for individual buildings.

The city itself is really pretty generic looking...a typical Midwestern town, with a Main Street, old neighborhoods, then suburbia and commercial strips.

But there are some really great buildings in town. I really like the Cummins world hq, a Cummins plant outside of the city (its half underground), and the Saarinen church and the library across the street.

I agree the downtown is typical for a town this size, but contrast that with the world famous architecture that surrounds that area.

Eero Saarinen, I.M. Pei, Phillip Johnson,
I think Harry Weese, way too many too remember. It's all very innovative, cutting edge stuff that just doesn't happen anywhere else, especially with this much local nuturing/support by the city, public and local big business. This is the way architecture should be done, not the developer driven way it is now for the majority of most American cities.

There is an itneresing pattern to the first wave of high-design architecture in Columbus.

Eliel Saarinen, of course, did that modern church, one of the early modern buildings in the US.


Saarinein also taught at Cranbrook art school up in Michigan...actually he designed the campus, and a lot of the first wave of modern buildings in Columbus (like the ones by Harry Weese) where by Cranbrook alumni, pupils of Saarinen, or by people who worked in his office. So Columbus was getting a more humanistic modernism than the very stark, minimalist Mies Van Der Rohe/SOM style that was popular in the 50s & 60s.

An excellent photo book on Columbus architecture is by Balthazar Korab, who also worked for Saarinen.

If architecture schools in our area don't make an annual pilgrimmage to Columbus with incoming freshman, they definitely should.

Some of the ideas realized in Columbus, went on to become mainstream, and trends
10 years later. I love that grade school with the different colored tubes/ramps for
the different classroom groups. Learning should be an adventure, and the school
should take kids away from everyday mundane reality.

I have not seen a lot of successful school buildings, in my brief exposure to them,
I went to school in a very tired, weary, depressing relic of education.