About an hour south of Indianapolis, an unlikely collection of modern architecture is tucked throughout this town. There is a brick public library with a high waffled ceiling by I.M. Pei., a fire station featuring clean lines and a stylized number 4 by Robert Venturi, and a hexagonal Eero Saarinen church with a narrow spire that appears ready to launch into space.
Welcome to Columbus, Ind., population 51,000. This town’s emergence as a hub of mid-century American design is largely thanks to Joseph Irwin Miller, an idealistic industrialist and philanthropist, and his family’s company, the diesel engine manufacturer Cummins.
In the 1950s, Miller wanted to attract engineering talent to Cummins and accommodate a growing population due to the Baby Boom. He believed cutting-edge design would help draw the best and the brightest to his Midwestern town.
“It wasn’t really an architecture program in its initial conception,” says Will Miller, the youngest of Miller’s five children. “It was a response to a community problem with a creative solution in the moment.”
His father, who was also influential in the civil rights movement, never intended to turn his hometown into a design mecca or a tourist attraction. Yet because of the high concentration of buildings, public artworks, and landscape architecture projects by modernist masters, it’s become a site of pilgrimage for tens of thousands of architecture aficionados.
Columbus, the subject of a new book and the backdrop of a 2017 movie, is not just a marvel of design. It’s also exemplary of place-based philanthropy and its long civic tail. The model of philanthropy Miller championed, through the Cummins Foundation and the family’s personal giving, was one of soft influence — an approach that required community input and collaboration. That approach continues today.
Miller’s architectural experiment helped shape the town’s culture around a consensus that urban aesthetics matter. That legacy is carried on today by nonprofits like the Landmark Columbus Foundation, which funds creative ways to maintain historic properties and introduces the town’s design ethos to new generations, all while continuing to bring together a diverse group of community partners. And the Cummins Foundation has been there all along, continuing to support new design in its backyard.
The Cummins Foundation’s cumulative investment into the architecture program in the nearly 70 years since it began is somewhere just north of $20 million, though executives would not confirm a dollar amount. That’s a relatively tiny fraction of the corporate foundation’s overall grant making, which includes support for local nonprofits focused on education, equity, and the environment in the communities where its employees live and work. But it’s certainly the most visible and famous part.
“There’s a fair amount of corporate activism out there that would suggest that’s not an appropriate place to put shareholder dollars,” says Jim Schacht, vice president of corporate responsibility at Cummins and CEO of the Cummins Foundation. “We can have a very confident discussion of why we do this, but we would rather not. We would rather talk about the positive impact and the legacy of architecture and design in our headquarters community that we’ve contributed to.”
Modern Architecture for a Modern American Town
Columbus might have remained an aesthetically average Midwestern town if not for Miller’s friendship with a budding Finnish-American architect, Eero Saarinen.
In the 1930s, Saarinen’s father, Eliel, was hired to design a new building for First Christian Church, the Miller family’s congregation. As one of the first modernist churches in the country, the design was revolutionary in Columbus and beyond. Saarinen came from Michigan’s Cranbrook Academy of Art, an influential hub of modern architectural thought, to meet with the church’s building committee, which included Miller’s mother and great uncle. Miller, in his 20s at the time, was tasked with entertaining the younger members of the design team.
They included two people who would become giants of modernist design: Charles Eames, now best known for his iconic chairs, and Saarinen’s son, Eero, who would go on to design the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, among other projects. Miller and the younger Saarinen struck up what would become a close friendship. They often found themselves at Zaharakos, the Victorian ice cream parlor that still sits on Columbus’ main drag, debating architecture, design, and the rise of fascism in Europe.
Miller, whose family became wealthy through banking, real estate, and cornstarch refining, had studied at Yale and Oxford. In 1942, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy. When his uncle died the following year, the 35-year-old Miller returned to Columbus to lead Cummins, which was producing essential wartime engines for trucks, ships, and generators.
The decades that followed were boom times in Columbus. Construction of the interstate highway system and postwar industrialization helped propel Cummins’ growth. Under Miller’s leadership, the company built a reputation for what would come to be called “stakeholder capitalism,” the belief that corporate responsibility extends far beyond making money for shareholders.
Meanwhile, Columbus needed more schools, and it needed them quickly. The local school system estimated it would have to build a new elementary school every two years to keep up with local birth rates. But that didn’t mean it should sacrifice on style. Miller believed that quality education for the children of Cummins employees also required world-class buildings in which to learn.
To do that, Miller established a program at his company’s new foundation to pay top-tier architects to design the schools, as long as the school board chose an architect from a list the foundation provided. Many architects were early in their careers and would go on to achieve international renown.
In 1957, the Cummins Foundation made its first grant to support the design of Lillian C. Schmitt Elementary School. Chicago architect Harry Weese, who would go on to design the Washington Metro subway system, was selected. The school, which is still in use today, is built around a central multipurpose room with a roofline that peaks over each classroom. It’s far different from the boxy off-the-shelf designs that were being built quickly and cheaply as schools across the U.S.
The Cummins program then broadened its architectural mandate to include any publicly owned and operated facilities in the county — libraries, fire stations, public housing, a golf course, even the county jail.
The program’s heyday, from the mid 1950s through mid 1970s, reflects the evolution of mid-century modern American architecture from spare “less is more” styles to more eclectic and playful postmodernism. But it continues today. A new elementary school is going up on the town’s west side. A high-design air traffic control tower is planned for the municipal airport.
In the early days of the program, Miller was an outsize influence, says Schacht. “He made these decisions” about which of the era’s up-and-coming architects would appear on the foundation’s lists. But after presenting a list of around five architects to the school board or other public committee, the Cummins Foundation would step out of the way. It was a means to ensure that the people of Columbus, not the company, had the ultimate say.
“He may have contributed the most, but he always made room for others to be involved,” says Ben Wever, director of the Miller House, who was Mr. Miller’s caretaker for the last few years of his life.
When a school was designed, for example, kids were often asked to look at the models and offer feedback about what they liked. “He wanted everyone to be excited about design,” Wever says. “It was never ‘This is what I say, so it goes.’”
“Irwin knew he had so much influence that he always wanted to protect himself from exerting it,” the architect Harry Weese, who designed 14 buildings in Columbus, said in an oral history interview.
But Miller’s influence did extend far beyond Indiana. While Columbus was getting increasingly built out, Miller was simultaneously establishing a national profile in his support of racial justice.
In 1960, he became the first non-clergyman to serve as president of the National Council of Churches. In that role, he worked on civil rights legislation with presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson leading up to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He also helped to organize the March on Washington with Martin Luther King, Jr.
A 1967 issue of Esquire featured Miller on its cover with the tagline: “This man ought to be the next president of the United States.”
‘Total Community Project’
Miller died in 2004, and while his influence in Columbus loomed large, architecture critic Matt Shaw argues that the making of the town was bigger than the interests of one man. In his new book, American Modern: Architecture; Community; Columbus, Indiana, he refers to the town’s architectural development as a “total community project” — a collective effort that brought together many parties in pursuit of good design.
The Cummins program and Miller’s elite taste inspired other companies and individual donors in the community to support high-design buildings and landscape architecture. The local newspaper, churches, and other businesses (several of which were also owned by the Miller family) saw value in prioritizing design.
“I’m particularly pleased that it’s a shared value and not just a something funders have imposed with their money,” says Will Miller, a member of the Cummins corporate board.
In addition, Shaw writes, “Architecture gave the community tools for thinking about other problems and established a tangible, social infrastructure that inspired others.” Other problems included efforts to bring residents together to improve community health.
As Shaw reports, the Miller family had a saying, “spell, and let others pronounce,” to describe how philanthropy could shape an outcome while respecting community leadership.
Columbus’ story has inspired at least one other philanthropy to take a similar approach. When the Walton Family Foundation launched its Northwest Arkansas Design Excellence Program, which supports architecture and landscape design in the Bentonville area, program officers came to Indiana to learn from local leaders and cited the Cummins Foundation’s effort as a model.
(The Walton Family Foundation is a financial supporter of the Chronicle of Philanthropy.)
Following Miller’s death, his family hired a consultant to help develop a plan to spend down the $25 million in their personal philanthropy, the Irwin-Sweeney-Miller Foundation. Much of those funds went to support downtown revitalization, including redevelopment of the futuristic Commons building, an indoor shopping and community space designed by César Pelli, renowned for designing some of the world’s tallest buildings. The funds also addressed challenges familiar to many small cities — like empty storefronts and lack of parking. Some money went to the Columbus Capital Foundation, an organization managed by the county’s community foundation that holds onto sensitive properties until the right use can be found.
That’s important at a time when Columbus is changing. A 2021 Wall Street Journal article called it one of the fastest diversifying small cities in the country, thanks to the roughly three dozen international companies that operate in the area.
One of the greatest examples of adaptive reuse is Eero Saarinen’s North Christian Church, a National Historic Landmark that’s one of Columbus’ most recognizable structures. With too few members to sustain the church, the congregation disbanded two years ago, donating the property to the Columbus Capital Foundation. This past summer the foundation donated the property to the local library to use as an event space.
“A lot of people thought, and still think, we were crazy for even thinking of accepting this,” says Jason Hatton, director of the Bartholomew County Public Library System. But he sees it as an asset that can help push back on what purposes a building — and a library — can play in a town. “It’s just amazing to think that this will belong to the community for generations,” he says.
No matter its use, the building and its grounds remain important to architecture buffs.
Each year, about 10,000 people take architecture tours through the Columbus Area Visitors Center, says Erin Hawkins, director of strategic partnerships and communications. Many others visit the town and its buildings on their own.
But it’s difficult to measure the impact of the architecture on the town’s economy, Hawkins says. Compared to travel to Cummins and other local corporate headquarters, sports tournaments, and an Army training facility just north of town, she says, “architecture geeks are a pretty small niche audience when it comes to tourism.”
One of the main sites of interest is the Miller House, J. Irwin and his wife Xenia’s Eero Saarinen-designed home with its grounds by Dan Kiley, one of the most influential American landscape architects. The centerpiece of the home’s open white-walled living room is an early example of a “conversation pit,” a sunken seating area lined with brightly colored seating, pillows, and carpeting.
It was there that Miller, a trustee of institutions like the Ford Foundation, the Museum of Modern Art, and Yale University, would entertain fellow board members, along with contemporary philanthropists such as Peggy and David Rockefeller and guests like First Lady Lady Bird Johnson.
In 2009, the Miller family donated the home and many of its original furnishings to the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
Upkeep of Columbus’ architectural legacy has presented challenges — and new opportunities for community engagement.
In the decades since most of the buildings went up, many have needed repairs. This has presented tough questions about how to fix an important building without modifying its original design.
“It became really apparent that we didn’t have a way to make that decision very well,” says Tracy Souza, who led the Cummins Foundation from 2000 to 2011 and now is CEO of the Heritage Foundation, the Community Foundation of Bartholomew County. Unlike many towns, Columbus doesn’t have a historical landmarks council to establish rules for managing cultural heritage.
In 2015, the community foundation launched an effort to ensure the town’s investments in design excellence remain a source of inspiration for future generations. Landmark Columbus Foundation became an independent nonprofit in 2019 and, since 2016, has put on a biannual program to celebrate the town’s modernist legacy.
“Columbus has always been a place that raises bold ideas, and today we’re taking that tradition further, exploring how architecture, art, and design can reflect who we are and shape who we want to be,” Richard McCoy, Landmark Columbus’ executive director told the attendees. “Across the country, cities are grappling with the same questions, and we have a unique opportunity here to lead by example.”
Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content. See more about the Chronicle, the grant, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and our gift-acceptance policy.
