INArchitecture

Futuramic!

2011-12-30T07:48:00.000-08:00

Ahead of the New Year, let's take a look back. To 1948. I found these Oldsmobile ads in some old Vogue magazines. The 1948 cutting-edge design of the cars doesn't hold up so well, but take a look at the architecture! The "Futuramic" homes still look modern and new even to world weary almost-2012 eyes.

April 1948 Vogue featured a bright yellow Futuramic Oldsmobile and a wowser of a modern home by Chiarelli and Kirk. Their partnership started in 1944. This home was a real construction. The text states that the house was (is it still?) built in Port Angeles, Washington. Some more research indicates it must be the Dr. Schueler house built in that city in 1947.

The only photos I can find of the Dr. Schueler House are interiors. http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/kt1199r2zg/.

The May 15 issue brought the design with a delightfully curvaceous Olds Club Sedan and a delightfully angular house by Marcel Breuer! Look at that house! That's in 1948. That huge car fits nicely under the cantilever at the rear and it's all view out the front through those floor-to-ceiling windows! Breuer's Bauhaus ideals are shining here. Does anyone recognize this Breuer? It appears to be the Gilbert Tomkins House built in 1945 in Hewlett Harbor, NY.

Here's a photograph of the Tomkins house from http://trianglemodernisthouses.com/breuer.htm . Same house, yes?

In June Vogue gave us a cherry red Oldsmobile and a cheer-worthy piece of architecture by Vincent Kling. It's a beach house, but there's no location noted. Kling was a Philadelphia architect. Anyone have a clue as to where this house might be? This one is so futuristic I can't believe it was constructed. But I hope it was and I hope one of you readers can tell us where. Here's Miss June 1948 and isn't she a beaut?

1948 was a very good year for good design. In 2012, let's celebrate good design from all eras.

Cheers to you in the Futuramic New Year from C. Resources and INArchitecture!

Demolition ain't Development.

2011-10-19T05:54:00.000-07:00

We can all agree that Indianapolis has an abandoned home problem. The City has identified 4,500 buildings that are abandoned. Some burned out, abandoned homes in Indianapolis would probably never be rehabbed or repurposed as anything other than housing for squatters. Most of us are ok with those houses being demolished. But the City's new plan to demolish 1,200 buildings by the end of 2011 and take down an additional 800 -- a total 2,000 --- by the end of 2012 has preservationists and neighborhood advocates rightfully concerned, even outraged.

Looking for a quick fix with a sudden influx of money from the water utility sale, but without any redevelopment plans in line, the City/County Councillors and the Mayor allocated $15,000,000 to demolition and $0 to any other options that might save some of these homes and fill them with new neighbors.

If you have a gut feeling this isn't a good plan, you're right. Here are just a few of the salient reasons why.

1. All Smart Growth and New Urbanism tenets say that urban density is the best way to achieve a sustainable city. Empty lots between houses is counter to urban density. Empty lots lower walkability scores, don’t make the highest use of urban infrastructure and don’t use the embedded energy of the existing buildings.

2. While many houses may need to be demolished, clearly many on this list are not unsafe and many are saveable. The buildings were not surveyed by structural engineers. Health and Hospital, the agency that makes the "unsafe" call, does not do interior investigations. The decision of which buildings to add to the list was based on a wide variety of criteria, which may or may not include a hole in the roof, a hole in the foundation, tall grass, and/or police runs. But, many structural issues are repairable and demolishing a house should never be based on police runs. The bad tenants will just move to another house. We can't demolish every house they live in until they eventually move out of the county. Or at least, we shouldn't.

3. Right now, the City owns only a tiny percentage of the buildings to be demolished. Which means that any future development would be reliant on the absentee landlords being found and willing to sell the lots to developers.

4. This plan is a quick fix that will result in empty untended lots still in the possession of landlords who have already failed to maintain them. Health & Hospital will be putting thousands (or more) of extra dollars into maintaining these 2,000 lots after the demolitions. More money down the drain.

5. According to Reggie Walton, Assistant Administrator of the Abandoned Housing Initiative, the great majority of these properties are “severely delinquent” in property taxes. This means the City could take the properties and make them available for purchase. But the City has no intent to take the properties, which means little to no potential for development. [See Point 4]

6. Few if any of these properties have been offered up for sale. At least some might sell if the City would take the property and put them on tax sales or find other ways to get them into the hands of new owner/occupants.

7. Once the demolition has occurred the lien for demolition goes onto the property. Unless the original landlord is willing to pay the demolition cost, or the City is willing to forgive the fees, any new owner would have to pay off the cost of the demolition lien, as well as buy the property, adding even more cost to the properties and making their eventual reuse even more unlikely.

8. The bond was written to allocate all the money for demolition. It could and should be rewritten to allocate some for uses that are positive, such as rehab grants, stabilization programs, urban homesteader grants, and $1 house programs (such as the one introduced by Republican mayor William Hudnut).

9. In most cases, even neighbors who complain about the abandoned homes would rather see them filled with new homeowners than see them demolished. Alternative programs could use the same monies now designated for demolition to bring urban homesteaders into these buildings.

Now for something completely different: Gene Fowlkes -- Indianapolis Jazz History

2011-09-30T18:22:00.000-07:00

EUGENE (GENE) FOWLKES

Eugene (Gene) Fowlkes was born in 1930. He grew up in an African American neighborhood on the Eastside of Indianapolis where he went to public schools 56, 37, and 26 before attending the all-black Crispus Attucks High School. Gene is a tall, still-handsome, lanky man with long arms, legs and fingers. He laughs a lot.

As a child, Gene was intrigued by his oldest brother’s trombone, but his arms were too short to play the instrument. “That could be the reason that later on I just decided to get one [of my own]. I went to Sack’s pawn shop that was on Indiana Avenue . . . bought a trombone for either $50 or $75.” That was in 1947.

Gene’s first musical influences were the well-known trombonist, J. J. Johnson, and Johnson’s wife Vivian. It was Vivian who introduced Fowlkes to Johnson’s recordings and the stories of their lives in New York City. When Gene began to play his pawn shop trombone he practiced by playing along to J.J.’s recordings loaned to him by Vivian. He played those 78s so much he wore deep grooves in them.

Playing trombone turned Gene’s life around. “I don’t guess I was pretty much no different than the 17, 16, 17 year-old kids now, just want to hang out. Then I heard about the Hampton family. Now that was the turning point of my whole life.” How’d you hear about them? “I went over to McArthur’s Conservatory of Music (on Indiana Avenue) that’s how I met the Hamptons.”

Gene paid for his lessons at McArthur’s with his G.I. Bill, a benefit he received at an early age. At the end of World War II, Gene enlisted, faking his age. When his mother sent the Commander Gene’s birth certificate showing he was only 16, he was sent home. But his benefits kicked in anyway affording Gene a chance to train at the premier music school in Indianapolis. Soon he started hanging out with Buddy Montgomery at Wes Montgomery’s house on Cornell Street in Indianapolis. “So between the Hampton family and Wes Montgomery, Buddy, and Monk . . . I just fell in love with jazz,” he says.

Because the trombone was not an essential instrument in most jazz groups, Fowlkes rarely had a steady job in a house band, but he stayed relatively busy playing in quintets or larger groups whenever he could land a gig. His work ethic matured when he started at the Cotton Club in Cincinnati. There he played in a group that also included left-handed trombone player Slide Hampton (of the Indianapolis Hampton family). “I remember one morning in particular . . . I heard him practicing and I was so inspired. Now, here’s a guy that played better than me, now he’s up practicing, I’m laying in the sack. So I got up, shook my head and put my clothes on and went down and I started practicing.”

When Gene returned from his second stint in the armed forces--this time he was drafted--he got a job at the Turf Club at 16^th and Lafayette Road. Drummer Sonny Johnson formed a group with tenor saxophonist Pookie Johnson, Monk Montgomery, on the just-introduced electric Fender bass, Gene Fowlkes on trombone, and Carroll DeCamp on piano. It was a “wonderful, wonderful gig.”

Unfortunately for Gene, Sonny Johnson eventually decided to change the group. He "fired" Carroll DeCamp and replaced him with Buddy Montgomery, “fired” Gene and replaced him with guitar phenomenon, Wes Montgomery. The new Johnson-Montgomery Quintet became the hot jazz band in Indianapolis. "For people old enough to remember what that group was, you know, and how they sounded, man that was really good,” Gene says years later, despite his own bad luck in situation and an intervening period of admitted sour grapes. The change in band also made the two outcasts, DeCamp and Fowlkes great friends with a shared disappointment, both in losing their jobs and knowing how much better the group was after they were kicked out. “We talked about them like dogs,” Gene says with a laugh. But even the outcasts knew there was something very special in the chemistry of the Johnson-Montgomery quartet.

After losing that job at the Turf Club, Fowlkes went on the road with Jimmy Coe, Earl Van Riper, Mingo Jones, Earl Fox Walker and Bill Boyd in Indianapolis band leader Jimmy Coe’s band. They were the opening act for an all-black group with a rock-and-roll hit. Gene no longer remembers the name of that band nor their song. But he’ll never forget the dismal segregation of the South. He saw first-hand separate water fountains, separate lines at ice cream stands, and when they played in Dallas, Texas, “There was one big rope tied right down the middle of the room. The blacks on one side and the whites on the other side. You couldn’t cross the line.”

In 1957 Gene fell in “LUV” [his pronunciation and emphasis] and passed up the opportunity to go on the road with the Lionel Hampton group. Instead he got married and took a factory job at Western Electric. He didn’t give up music but about that time he decided to switch from the trombone to the bass, figuring he could find more work on the weekends as a bass player. Because both instruments are in the bass clef he didn’t have a problem reading the bass part; says he had to slow his mind down for the bass, because the trombone “is faster and quicker.” He learned the new instrument from other bass players in town at the time, several of whom went on to make very big names in much bigger cities: Leroy Vinnegar, Larry Ridley, Monk Montgomery, Philip (Flip) Stewart. A bass player from Detroit, Bill Yancy, who was playing at George’s Orchid Bar on Indiana Avenue, taught Gene the correct hand positions, which made him a much more controlled player. He was no longer “just grabbin’” at his new instrument.

As a bass player Fowlkes worked with Wes Montgomery whenever Monk was out of town, and went on the road with the famous Earl “Fatha” Hines. Though a testament to the skill he had developed, that road trip also turned Gene away from his musical career. Earning $400 a week in the late 1970s, he found it nearly impossible to live in Los Angeles and make enough money to pay his mortgage in Indianapolis. He says he barely managed to pay his dog food bills to fellow musician Claude Sifferlein, who was dogsitting for the recently divorced Fowlkes.

Tired of hiding from bill collectors, when Gene returned to Indianapolis he took a full-time job with the CETA program in the purchasing department at the City/County Building. While there he saw a posting for a position as a correctional officer. It paid $12 an hour, so he decided that would be his next job. On his first day of work at the Indiana Youth Center in Plainfield, he “saw so many of my old buddies. Boy it was like old home week.” When he found out he could be a parole officer if he earned 15 hours of college credit, he completed an associate’s degree, and began to look for a new position. Never one to believe that racial discrimination held him back, Fowlkes plainly states that it was age discrimination, not his race, which prevented him from finding a position as a parole officer. But he continued to work in the corrections field and eventually retired at age 62 from his job at the men’s work release center.

During these years of working the midnight shift in corrections, Gene had to give up playing gigs. Although he missed it for a long time, he doesn’t anymore. Now, he loves to stay home with his dog, Sheba and grow flowers. He plays music, keeps the remote control “duct-taped” to his wrist so he can stay up-to-the-minute on sports, and works on his house. At age 70 believes Gene Fowlkes says he’s had one wonderful life.

Connie J. Zeigler

3/10/01

With David Andrichik, owner of the Chatterbox Jazz Club, filming them, I completed 16 oral histories with jazz musicians inducted into the Indianapolis Jazz Hall of Fame between 1998 and 2002. Gene Fowlkes was one of my favorite subjects. He was funny and modest and irreverent. I wrote this short biography a couple of years after our interview. The taped interviews and their transcripts belong to the Indianapolis Jazz Foundation.

Eugene Fowlkes died on February 25, 2005.

Pleasure Valley

2011-08-30T10:56:00.000-07:00

In an on-going quest to find my own little cabin on a river, on Saturday I went exploring. I've spent a lot of time on the Flatrock River this year and have found a nice swimming hole or two in the process. I've also spotted a fair number of old fishing cabins along its windy course--many abandoned.

Pleasure Valley's one road is a private drive.

Like many rivers in Indiana, the Flatrock was once considered a fisherman's delight. Both scenic and fertile it has a limestone river bed (the flat rock that inspired its name) perfect for navigating in hip waders. Even today (after years of field runoff and human contamination) the Flatrock is considered a "Scenic River" and boasts an incredible abundance and variety of fish. The river once again looks healthy although, like many Midwestern rivers, its considered impaired with eColi (my first rule of swimming here is don't put your mouth in the water).

Google aerial of Pleasure Valley along the Flatrock River

Believe it or not, the Flatrock River was also once known for its resort amenities. I assume that's the origin of the name of the little community called Pleasure Valley. A click or two north of the town of Geneva, also once a resort location, Pleasure Valley was founded in 1937, according to the sign at the end of its one private road. Although most of the homes here were constructed as seasonal cabins, they've all been converted into full-time dwellings over the years. There are concrete block, frame, and even log houses fronting the river and backing onto the road. Most of the dwellings are altered with new windows, some with vinyl siding, but they mostly retain a cabiny feel and some are still as cute as the speckled belly on a puppy.

Concrete block cabin, circa 1940

I've always thought it strange that in Indiana few people live in the best places. What could be a better location than a hill overlooking a beautiful river? But these old-timer resort areas along the rivers and creeks of Indiana are disappearing either from disuse or because cabins get replaced by larger houses as people decide to live in them full-time instead of for a few months each summer. The banks of White River in Indianapolis's Rocky Ripple and Ravenswood and even Broad Ripple were once populated by the small seasonal cabins that still exist in Pleasure Valley. Oddly, as the rivers become more polluted and less desirable as recreational spots they seem to become more likely to either draw permanent housing or to be completely abandoned as dwelling spots.

View to the river from the one road through Pleasure Valley.

I don't know if that's true elsewhere in the country, but it seems to be so in Indiana these days. In the years before TV and Wii, playstations and Bluray we tended to seek our entertainment outside. In the summer we sought it in the water. That's not so true nowadays. But the folks in Pleasure Valley seem pretty happy to be throwbacks to simpler times. I would be, too. I've got my eye on a nice concrete-block number there.

Gunnison Homes -- The New Miracle

2011-07-20T07:01:00.000-07:00

I've written about Gunnison Homes before in this blog. See: http://cresourcesinc.blogspot.com/2010/07/former-gunnison-factory-new-albany.html. Running across a newspaper article while I was doing research gives me an excuse to post up a bit more information.

Gunnison Magic Homes was the first really successful pre-fab housing firm in the United States. By 1940, this Indianapolis Star article claims that it was the "nation's largest home builder." In the pre-World War II era that may have been true. It's safe to say that the company sold thousands of homes over the course of its history.

From his factory, which still stands in New Albany, Indiana, Foster Gunnison produced pre-fab homes built with insulated plywood panels in an assembly-line system. Forbes called him the "Henry Ford of housing." Raw materials arrived at the front door, the walls, ceiling and floors were factory finished, doors hung and "windows installed, washed and screened" as the panels moved along the conveyor belts and out the rear door onto trucks headed all across the nation.

This September 29, 1940, article introduced a new line of Gunnison Homes, the Miracle Home. Demonstration homes were already built by this time in Indianapolis, South Bend and Jeffersonville, Indiana. Unlike the Deluxe Home, which came in nine standard sizes ranging from four to seven rooms and retailing from $4,000 to $8,500, these new Miracle Homes were all four rooms. They could be installed with or without a basement and were sold on installment plans, approved for FHA loans, for $360 down and $25.60 monthly payments, including insurance and property taxes.

Indianapolis builder, Robert L. Mason was the local rep for the Miracle Homes. It's hard to know how many of these little Miracles were built in the city, but the demonstration home shown in the picture at the bottom of the article and located in the 3500 block of North Keystone Avenue, still stands as you can see in this google maps pic. I wonder if its owners know the history of their house?

First Christian Church by Eliel Saarinen Opens May 31, 1942. Here are the goods.

2011-06-25T09:32:00.000-07:00

I Stumbled upon two articles about the opening of Eliel Saarinen's First Christian Church in Columbus, Indiana (at that time called Tabernacle Church of Christ), as I was doing research in the "Indianapolis Star".

Nearly everyone interested in modern architecture knows that Finnish-born Eliel Saarinen, chief architect, head of the architecture department and first president of Cranbrook Academy in Michigan, received the commission from William G. Irwin and his sister, Mrs. Hugh Thomas Miller, to design the small town's first piece of modern architecture. This church ingrained a love of modern architecture in Miller's son, J. Irwin Miller, created a bond between J. Irwin and Eero Saarinen, and set Columbus on a path of modernism that continues to astound even today.

This first illustration jumped off the screen at me as the microfilm advanced. The tall campanile tower of First Christian was unmistakable and had me reversing instantly for a closer look. [click on images to enlarge]

I learned a wonderful bit of not-so-trivial trivia when I read the caption under the drawing. Indianapolis's Pierre & Wright were the associate architects for First Christian. When Eliel Saarinen's name is on a project of course local firms drop by the wayside, but Edward Pierre & George Wright, whose work includes Perry (later renamed Bush) Stadium http://bit.ly/j5xloi, the competition-winning design for the Indiana State Library building, and numerous others, were lights of modernism in Indianapolis. They would have been a logical choice to manage this project for Saarinen.

If you haven't taken the Columbus Architecture tour, which I highly recommend, then you may not know that the church was designed around a reflecting pool as mentioned in this article. I wish I'd seen it when the pool still existed but in the 1950s it became a concrete courtyard due to leaking issues and damage caused by the reflection of the sun onto the tower--you get the essence of what was here, but it must have been an even more lovely spot when it was filled with water creating a mirrored image of the tower.

I like how the author talks of the church's "symmetrical balance rather than conventional symmetrical plan". In person, the asymmetry strikes the casual observer but I think this writer is correct, this luminous church is an artful balancing act.

The second article makes note of the working partnership between Eliel and his son, Eero Saarinen, on the church. Eero, who would go on to design Columbus's North Christian Church and the Miller Home in Columbus, designed interior furnishings at North Christian for his father. The church was a family affair: Eliel's wife Loja Saarinen, designed the tapestry, which was woven at Cranbrook.

[Both Eero Saarinen's North Christian Church--at left, and Eliel Saarinen's First Christian Church are National Historic Landmarks]

Most of the text from the second article was about the dedicatory service for the church. It does mention the price tag: $650,000 in 1942, prompting the insupportable claim that it was "one of the most expensive churches of modern design in the world."

Certainly for those with an eye for modernism, First Christian is one of the most beautiful churches of modern design in the world.

Today, you can view the church through a Henry Moore sculpture, Large Arch, which sits just across the street. It was dedicated in 1971, five years after Eero Saarinen designed a rather large arch of his own in St. Louis.

You can read the successful National Historic Landmark nomination and the statement of significance for First Christian Church online: http://www.nps.gov/nhl/designations/samples/in/1stchris.pdf

Then, drive, fly or bus yourself to Columbus, Indiana, and see it in brick and mortar. It's worth the trip.

Good Reason for Pride

2011-05-13T11:09:00.000-07:00

This week I came across a 1958 newspaper article bragging about the bright future of modern architecture in Indianapolis. Yes, that's right, in the 1950s there was good reason to be optimistic that Indianapolis might become one of the nation's showcases of modernism.

Two office buildings and a beautiful limestone-skinned J. C. Penney store by Skidmore Owings and Merrill were already completed or under construction; a glass curtain-wall City-County tower with limestone wings would open in 1961; a new State Office building by the Chicago firm, Graham, Anderson, Probst and White was scheduled to break ground, a complex of high rise apartment buildings by Perkins + Will, and a handful of other great projects were in the works or recently completed in the city.

Here's how we felt about our new buildings in 1958. [double-click on images to enlarge].

Sadly, by the early 1960s the excitement over urban renewal, and apparently the federal dollars that helped pay for it, were drying up, leaving Indianapolis with a few good buildings but not much architectural future to count on. I'm not a fan of disrespecting Indianapolis, which is a trendy thing to do among the people who live here, but I'd like a good reason, like a few interestingly modern buildings, to make me and others feel really prideful in the city's architectural future again. Maybe that will happen.

Some History with our Culture?

2011-04-18T08:35:00.000-07:00

[An interurban ran right along Virginia Avenue. The track has been severed in the demolition of the street for the Cultural Trail]

[The cut for the Virginia Avenue leg of the Cultural Trail -- click images to enlarge]

A few years back Indianapolis began construction of a "Cultural Trail." This trail links the "Cultural Districts" that the city's marketers thought up a few years before that. The Cultural Districts include Mass Ave, Broad Ripple, Fountain Square, the Wholesale District, and the Canal District, and probably some other place I've forgotten. Some of these places definitely have pizzazz and all have some version of culture. Anyplace where humans hang out probably has culture. But a big part of capital-C "Culture," the stuff that defines and is defined by specific places, people and events, is history. Arguably a shared history is the biggest factor in creating culture, in fact.

I like the Cultural Trail for bike riding. It's wide and smooth and safe. And I love the natural landscaping used in swales beside the trail. But I have a big gripe with the Cultural Trail's impact. In the process of creating a wide, paved sidewalk with a lot of lights and way too many bollards and signs, the city is distracting from and even destroying parts of our history, which are probably more worthy of remembrance and reverence than anything the trail offers. The trail is so distracting, with all its tchotchkes, that it becomes the focus of the view in the areas it travels through. You might once have noticed the old commercial buildings on Mass Ave or the old residences on Walnut Street. Now, you'll be noticing the Ikea style light fixtures and way too many silly metal bollards.

This year, my neighborhood of Fountain Square gets its leg of the trail. I've been sure to walk along the construction/destruction zone often to gaze into the big dig as they tear up the street down to about 2 feet deep. What can currently be seen on Virginia Avenue under the layers of modern concrete and asphalt pavement is the old big-bricks street and old interurban tracks still laid on their wooden ties.

[A clean cut shows the old brick street beneath the many layers of modern pavement]

There's a view at our culture! This pavement and these tracks harken to the days when Virginia Avenue was a happening hub of German retail businesses, theaters showing silent films, grocery stores and artisans shops and traveling dramatic troupes. A time when you could get on the interurban in Franklin and quickly arrive to spend the day in Fountain Square, maybe stopping at the farmer's market that used to be on South Street, or going on to downtown to shop at Ayres. The days before the interstate severed Fletcher Place and Fountain Square, before Fletcher Place even had a separate name, back to the time when Woodlawn Street might still be remembered as a reference to the Calvin Fletcher farm, Woodlawn, which he platted into building sites to create this entire area.

[more of the old Interurban line not yet yanked out and discarded]

Today Fountain Square lays some legitimate claim to being an arts district. There are a few galleries and there are lots of artists living and working here. There's definitely culinary craft in our great locally owned restaurants and cool stuff in our handful of funky shops. We're worthy of being a leg on a trail to connect up the downtown Indianapolis interesting spots. But an even deeper view into our culture is briefly revealed now by construction of the trail that will soon rip it from our past.

I think it would be great if the movers in this trail idea would take a step back from creating a uniform, generic sidewalk with a few bits of art installed along it and the occasional marker to SAY something historic happened here, to somehow preserving and revealing a small portion of the actual link to our history and formative culture, which they are currently digging up and destroying in order to install their cute pavers.

[See the old railroad ties beneath the brick street?]

I know that isn't likely to happen. Our history is being destroyed every day by the city and private interests. And the Cultural Trail is a fun idea so it's not popular to dislike it. Still, it could be a truly great idea if it also preserved our culture in the process of marketing it. Any chance you're listening, Brian Payne?

Enochsburg. Wow! look at these limestone houses! Oh, and the fried chicken is great!

2011-04-06T07:37:00.000-07:00

A drive through southeastern Indiana took me into Enochsburg yesterday. Bordering Decatur and Franklin counties, Enochsburg, like much of this area, was settled by German immigrants. Smaller than nearby Oldenburg, which was and is a Catholic community, Enochsburg's forefathers and -mothers were German Evangelicals. These stalwart immigrants built a stone church on a strong foundation in 1858. The church still stands today, although the centerpiece of the community is probably the Fireside Inn, which draws a large regional clientele to its tasty fried chicken.

I've eaten my share of fried chicken, but these days it's the limestone church, houses and nearby bridge that fascinate me more. With apologies for my blackberry-snapped photographs, here's a little bit of what's charming about the countryside's built environment in this area.

Decatur County isn't, but should be, famous for its beautiful, arched limestone bridges. A very early limestone industry sprang up in Decatur County (the foundation stone for the second Indiana State House came from Decatur County). This triple-arched bridge on County Line Road just south of Enochsburg is just one example of how the county made aesthetic and practical use of its limestone. Off to the west of this bridge on CR 150 S, is another example, a beautiful stone house.

Although there are metal numbers on the facade of this great vernacular style house that date it to 1880, I suspect it's an even earlier example. Probably from the 1860s. Isn't she a beauty?

Travel north on County Line Road just a bit and there's another equally beautiful limestone house sitting on a rise, still partly sheltered by the cedar trees that were probably planted in an allee leading to the front door at one time.

A number of limestone outbuildings remain at the modernized farms nearby and behind some of the more modern bungalows in Enochsburg proper. These outbuildings attest to the easy pickings for scraps and overburden that were leftover from harvesting stone for proper buildings. Limestone outcroppings are still visible along the creeks and waterways of the area, too.

Finally, like the German settlers before us, we reach Enochsburg's grand limestone church. Placed on the highest spot in town it was once the figurative center of community and culture. It's a beautiful old building; marked 1858 on the gilded tablet in the facade. Perhaps less of a draw these days than the Fireside Inn's fried chicken, this church reminds us why Enochsburg is here and how our ancestors made the highest use of a local material.

Muscatatuck State Mental Hospital / Army Urban Combat Training Grounds

2011-02-12T15:12:00.000-08:00

The Muscatatuck State Hospital opened in 1920 as the Indiana Farm Colony for Feeble Minded Youth. It was one of several state hospitals serving Indiana's mentally disabled. According to the idea lab at Purdue University's webpage http://idealab.tech.purdue.edu/muscatatuck/home.html the hospital initially served only male youths. They lived in three farmhouses on this property near both Muscatatuck River and Brush Creek. Like the architecture at all of Indiana's state mental health institutions this campuses's architecture is wonderful.

In the 1920s and 1930s the first dormitories went up on the campus and the first women became inmates. These dorms and most of the other existing buildings went up in the midst of the Art Deco Movement and they are grand representations of that style. These photos, captured with my telephone don't do justice to the marvelous Deco genre expressed in aluminum details and yellow brick walls.

The hospital building is an Art Deco gem built in the 1940s.

The state hospital stopped treating the mentally ill in 2005 and became an Indiana Army National Guard training center. Today, the campus holds acres of shipping containers, FEMA trailers, a inexplicable mosque, steel girders supporting concrete block half walls, and topsy turvy structures creating an intentional look and feel of a bombed-out town.

In the midst of this intentional chaos, the original buildings retain their streamlined machine-age stylishness.

I went to Alert Indiana and found a round barn--and a state bank.

2011-01-05T18:51:00.000-08:00

Alert, Indiana, sits at a lonely crossroads in the southwestern corner of Decatur County. There's very little reason to visit. Once you find, it you can see why not many people live there. My father, who has lived all his 82 years in the county and now spends a good portion of his time with my mother on daily "country drives," says it's been 60 years since he last drove through Alert. We drove there yesterday to look for a building shown in the 1882 Atlas of Decatur County.

Alert was important enough to merit its own map in that Atlas (that's it above). In 1882, it was a town of about 100 souls (probably triple the number who currently call it home), the second largest in Jackson Township after Sardinia, which had twice as many residents. The town had one local merchant, J. W. Spears, who was also Alert's biggest landholder and a breeder and purveyor of fancy chickens. Spears' general store, shown in the 1882 lithograph below, no longer stands. Though his house appears to still be the one that's falling down in the spot shown on the lithograph.

The location of the former Spears store is now occupied by a Masonic lodge constructed in the 1920s when the town still had enough residents to populate Alert Lodge #395. Sadly the lodge building has been worked over extensively and badly in the years since it membership died off or left town.

But there are a couple of buildings in Alert that are cool enough to justify the drive there.

The first is a round barn right at the edge of town (of course the edge of town is only four buildings from the center of town). Sitting on a rusticated concrete block foundation this barn must date to around 1910. It's horizontal siding could use a coat of paint but look at those great 9-light windows, not to mention the fabulous cupola on top. Its original owner must have been proud of the state-of-the-art choice he made when he opted for an innovative cutting-edge round barn. Perhaps he was sold on the idea by Benton Steele, Indiana's renowned round-barn designer/builder/promoter. In 2011, the shiny new standing-seam metal roof is a happy sign that someone feels proud of this beauty again.

A round barn was a representation of modernity and innovation in agriculture. Just a couple of doors north of this barn is Alert's other interesting building. On the main street of this town centered on one rural intersection, this bank building was a built environment metaphor for growth and potential when it was constructed around 1900. The limestone frieze in the bank's brick facade announces it the "Alert State Bank."

Nowadays, the Alert State Bank is someone's house--a nice reuse of the town's fanciest remaining building---aside from the round barn, that is.

In this tiny corner of Decatur County, Indiana, be Alert, there's interesting stuff in unexpected places.

Historic homes of Sardinia--the one in Decatur County.

2010-11-20T08:47:00.000-08:00

On a recent trip to Sardinia -- the Sardinia in Decatur County, Indiana, that is, I came upon this gorgeous old Italianate on that little settlement's main street, which is now SR 3.

Below is the same house in a photo taken from the east and looking west across the highway.

And below is an etching of this house from the 1882 Decatur County Atlas.

You can see that the tower is now missing, but the rest of the house is pretty much intact, though several windows are boarded up and there are roof issues that will wear this beauty down fast. This would be a fabulously rewarding fixer-upper project for someone.

The bottom house in the atlas etching above is still standing just south of the brick one, too. But it's had an addition on the facade and new vinyl siding (yuck). It hurt my eyes, so I didn't take a photo.

Sardinia has an agricultural history of great wealth directly connected to the construction of the railroad through the town. Although settled in 1835, all the once-grand homes in Sardinia and the nearby countryside date to the 1850s through 1870s, a time when the railroad was king and before "agribusiness" meant confined feeding operations and ownership of thousands of acres. The wealthy of the countryside around Sardinia owned a few hundred acres at most. They made the most of them and the rich land made them rich. Their houses show it and many of those old houses remain, though most have been altered. The one below is still in good shape and probably one of the oldest in the area. She's a beauty, eh?

I continue to be puzzled about the people who build cookie-cutter tract houses when grand dames like these exist all over the place. Decatur County is especially graced with existing brick homes from the second half of the 19th Century. I know it's expensive to restore an old house of this scale, but the $100,000 you might pay for a crappy house in a subdivision would go a long way toward turning a house like the first one into a restored beauty like this one. And it's an investment that helps us retain our history. You should think about it.

Decatur County Brick Houses, then/now

2010-11-01T17:53:00.000-07:00

I've always been intrigued by the Italianate-style brick houses that pepper the landscape of Decatur County, Indiana. I'm so intrigued that I decided to do a bit of research. Apparently even in 1882, when the county's atlas was published, these were considered to be some pretty terrific homes. Lots of Italianate homes are featured in lithographs in that atlas. And more than a few of them looked familiar to me.

So today, on my regular weekly visit to my parents in Greensburg, I took copies of those lithographs and we hunted for some of the houses. It wasn't as easy as I thought it would be, but so far, we've found two.

Here's the 1882 lithograph of the Residence of M. Grover, Greensburg, Indiana.

At first I thought this was the house with later period alterations. Notice the unusual roofline and general shape, returns on the cornices and the siting on a hill.

But no, that's not quite right. It's missing the bay window on the left side of the facade and it's not configured exactly right.

So we scouted the old center of Greensburg some more.

And got lucky. Here it is. The Grover house, in the 300 bock of Central Avenue, in 2010.

The three windows over the porch and the stone wall in front of the house clinched the ID. Once considered so impressive that someone sketched it and turned its image into a lithograph to represent the county's finest homes, this house now looks to be abandoned. That's some fine architecture going to ruin.

The other home we looked for was one of a multitude of Italianate farm houses constructed throughout the county in the 1870s. It would be a fascinating research project to see who the brick masons were who designed and constructed all these homes. Some are doppelgangers of their neighbors' or other homes just down the road. That happened to be the case here.

Here's the 1882 atlas of the John E. Robbins farm. See the gable of the barn facing the road off to the right? Notice the stone wall in front?

There are two houses in adjoining farms that match the design of the house in this litho. I'm not certain which is the right one.

The house below has new rectangular windows but the original arched openings are still visible, bricked in around the new windows. People, you shouldn't do that. Yuck. But even with these changes, you can see it's very similar to the, perhaps the very same, house in the litho.

And, lookee, next to the road, just to the north of this house (and not too far south of the one below), is the stone wall shown in the lithograph.

But wait. Just north of this house is its doppelganger. This second house is still in the Robbins family. Unfortunately, the trees are so thick you can't see the house well behind them in this photo. On the ground, I could see that the Gabled-Ell plan matched the one in the picture, and I could see the round oculus window under the gable, and the same brackets under the gable as shown in the house in the litho. The porch is the same configuration as the litho porch. AND, although it's nearly impossible to see through the trees, there is a board-and-batten barn behind the house to the right in exactly the same location and with the same windows as the one in the litho above.

So, which of these is the house?

Take a look at the front yard landscapes of both of these farmsteads, too. See the remnants of the plan shown in the lithograph? Although none of the trees in the two rows in front of the houses are old trees, both lawns show evidence that there was an allee of trees in the front lawn, later owners replanted trees where the original ones had been. Both of these farmsteads retain this landscape feature straight out of an Andrew Jackson Downing book.

I know one of these houses is the match. In my opinion, judging from the set back from the road, the curve in the road in front of the property, and the board-and-batten barn, and the fact that it's currently a Robbins family property, I think the second one is the Robbins farm shown in the lithograph. But since the first house also matches the one in the lithograph, and there's a portion of stone wall right next to the property, could be this is the one... Hm.

Final bit of analysis is the Atlas map. Not much help, it shows two houses [gray squares] on J. E. Robbins property along the Greensburg Sand Creek Toll Pike. And, by the way, the "school" noted on the map just south of the Robbins farm is still there, too.

Which one is the one in the litho, then? What do you think?

Tidbits on the City County Building, Indianapolis

2010-10-05T09:03:00.000-07:00

Last year I devoted an Urban Times column to the Indianapolis/Marion County City-County Building. You can read that column here: http://www.urbantimesonline.com/2009/07/appreciating-the-unappreciated-the-city-county-building/

The City-County building is a nice example of glass curtain-wall International Style and it deserves more appreciation than it has received. I hope that appreciation begins sooner rather than later so that we can protect the building from misguided renovations.

A couple of weeks ago, J. Parke Randall, one of the architects who helped design the City-County building, sent me copies of some original documents about it. I want to pass some of that information and other bits I've learned since writing the Urban Times column to all of you who have a mutual interest in the building and those who may come to appreciate it as they learn more about it. The information below is basically copied from the documents Parke Randall sent, though I added a bit of my own commentary in a couple of places.

According to a ring-bound booklet about the building, the City-County Building was a joint effort by the "Allied Architects & Engineers of Indianapolis." The firms involved were Lennox, Matthews, Simmons & Ford, Inc. and Vonnegut, Wright & Porteous, Inc., the local "Allied Architects and Engineers" group. Harley, Ellington & Day, Inc. was the consulting architects firm from Detroit. J. M. Rotz Engineering Co. provided mechanical engineers and Metropolitan Planners, Inc., the landscape designers.

According to a list compiled by the Indiana Architectural Foundation in 1994 people in the building design team included:
Richard C. Lennox, Architect in Charge
William C. Wright, Architect in Charge
Robert E. Lakin, Project Architect (tower design, elevators, material selections, etc.)
Marion L. Cramer, Structural Engineer
Louis E. Penniston, Architect for the jail wing design
Herbert M. Thompson, Architect for the courts wing design
Joe McGuire, Architect (specifications)
Courtney Macomber, Architect designer for all areas
Lee Hollinden, curtain wall design
Charles Pye, stair design
Kenny Curtis, toilet room designs [and let me just say that the restrooms are modern-stylish in this building]
Parke Randall, interior designs, cafeteria, Mayor's office, etc.
Maynard Cox, structural design
Dick Roettger, construction supervision
Ken Goodrich, interior design (colors) [good work, Goodrich. The color choices are both elegant and whimsical in this building]
Don Woehler, parking garage structural
Don Hammond, Tom Leonard, Gordon Herbert, Milton Cuppy, draftsmen
Bob Shroyer (models for preliminary design)
John Coffin, structural canopies
Joan Izor and Donna Polling secretaries

J. Parke Randall began working on the City-County building in April 1957, when he was 30; he finished in 1959. Prior to his position on this project he'd worked with E.I. Brown and the estimable Indianapolis architect, Edward D. Pierre. He joined Vonnegut, Wright & Porteus and, along with William (Bill) Wright, represented that firm as part of the Allied Architects on the C-C building. Randall kept a log of his work on the project, which included preliminary planning drawings and department layouts for the Mayor's Suite, Police Identification Dept., Crime Lab, Police Line Up, Police Property Dept., Photo Labs, Library, Detective Assembly, Health and Hospital Labs, Civil Engneer Labs, and Parking Garage.

Working on a building that deserves recognition but is mostly unappreciated must be a special kind of disappointment. If you know anyone involved in the design of the City-County Building, take a minute to say thanks for that good modern building, one of few in this city.

Skidmore Owings and Merrill SOM in Indianapolis

2010-08-19T18:34:00.000-07:00

Skidmore Owings and Merrill is a Chicago-based architecture firm made famous by its work in the International Style. Still winning awards for their innovative architecture, it's hard to list their best work, but among the most celebrated are the Lever House, John Hancock Center and Sears Tower. Lever House was one of the first glass curtain-wall office buildings in the U.S. when it went up in NYC in 1952. About 20 years later, SOM designed Chicago's John Hancock Center, and its Sears Tower was once the tallest building in the world. Their Infinity Tower opens in 2011 in Dubai.

This firm also has a nunber of significant connections to Indianapolis, and not just because they designed a handful of buildings in the city.

Nathaniel A. Owings, Nat, was born and raised in Indianapolis. In fact his family had been in the city more than a hundred years by then. His father, Nathaniel F. Owings was the Secretary/Treasurer of the Capitol Veneer Co. once located at 829 Chase St. In the book "Indianapolis Architecture" the younger Owings said that he grew up at 23rd and Park, but by the time he was 11, in 1914, the Indianapolis City Directories give his parents' address as 318 W. 17th Street (now a parking lot). By 1916, Owings was about to enter high school at Indianapolis's Arsenal Tech. His father had died in the intervening years; the City Directory shows that his mother, Cora, was a widow, and the family, which included his sister, Eloise, had moved to 3705 E. 16th Street (now part of Brookside Park). None of these houses has survived Progress in Indianapolis, so we can't make a pilgrimage to his early architectural inspirations.

Both Owings and his sister left Indianapolis by the 1920s. Eloise moved to Paris to attend the Paris Parson School of Design. At the same time, Louis Skidmore was traveling around Europe on a fellowship after finishing his degree at MIT. Like most of us, Skidmore especially enjoyed Paris. According to Louis Skidmore, Jr., his parents, Eloise and Louis, met at the Cafe Deux Magots. When they returned to the U.S. together, Eloise introduced her future husband to her brother, his future partner, Nathaniel A. Owings.

In 1936, Skidmore and Owings began their partnership in Chicago; they opened a New York office the following year. The third partner, John Merrill, joined the firm after he left Granger & Bollenbacher in 1939. Merrill had worked on a number of Federal Housing Authority sponsored apartment complexes and Skidmore and Owings hoped to steal some of that business away to their firm. Vassar professor, Nicholas Adams, states in his book, "Skidmore, Owings and Merrill since 1936" that SOM was the architect for Indianapolis's Marcy Village, an FHA apartment project near Broad Ripple in Indianapolis. But the architects of record on that project were Granger & Bollenbacher. Newspaper articles, beginning in 1938 and the project blue prints on file with the National Register nomination of Marcy Village all state G&B as architects. Perhaps Merrill worked on this project before he joined Skidmore and Owings but it seems impossible that Marcy Village could have been an SOM project.

Still, SOM had a profound effect on the built environment of Indianapolis. Their first project in Owings' home city was the gorgeous limestone-faced J. C. Penney building at 120 Monument Circle. [photo from "Indianapolis Architecture"] Constructed in 1950, two years before their famous Lever House International Style skyscraper was completed in NYC, the Penney's building is the object of preservationist scorn in Indianapolis because it replaced the fabulously opulent English Hotel and Opera House. Despite that grudge against the building, on its own merit, it was a beauty. At the beginning of downtown renewal, SOM offered Indianapolis an expansive and warm curved wall made of Indiana materials. There is truly reason to mourn the destruction of the English building, but, there is also reason to lament the later destruction of the beautifully modern Penney's, which has been replaced by a bland, post-modernish corporate HQ.

In its time the J. C. Penney building (or perhaps it was the firm's Lever House fame) must have impressed at least some in Indianapolis, for SOM landed another contract in the city in 1955. This time they built a modernist, glass curtain-wall low-rise office building for the Standard Life Insurance Company. Located at 300 E. Fall Creek Parkway, that building has not withstood the years particularly well. The neighborhood surrounding it has taken a downturn in the decades since its construction, but it must have always seemed out of context on this peninsula of land in a residential neighborhood. Traffic on Fall Creek Parkway moves so rapidly past the building that few people see it from the main facade with its International Style cantilevered aluninum canopy at the entry. Most are are more likely to recoginize it (if they notice it at all) from New Jersey Street's less-impressive facade. Now called the Julia Carson Government Center, the building has lately been the object of some rebirthing plans that will hopefully keep it around and relevant.

And there's still another SOM building in Indianapolis. The firm designed the former American Fletcher National Bank Building (now Chase Bank) at 101 Monument Circle. It opened in 1959, the same year that American Fletcher National Bank merged with Fidelity Bank & Trust. SOM gave Indiana's largest bank a modernist building in keeping with those modern times. They curved the spartan curtain-wall facade so it fit snugly onto the northeast quadrant of the Circle. [photo for sale at Emporis.com] Other than that curve, the building is classically International Style with great expanses of window walls and little ornament other than the wide, flat pilasters that rise from sidewalk to roof line. The interior was modern-opulent. Although American Fletcher National Bank dissolved into another banking giant in the 1970s and has been sold and merged into others since then, this elegant SOM building has staying power. In the midst of some remarkable and some unremarkable architecture on the Circle, it stands out as the most modern (far more so than many of the newer buildings).

Skidmore Owings and Merrill transformed the Circle with this building and the J. C. Penny building in the 1950s and they made their mark a bit further north along Fall Creek Parkway. That era of optimism and renewal brought good architecture to a city that has not seen much of it since then. SOM is internationally famous and continues to turn out remarkable buildings around the world, but Indianapolis has its own portion of that famous firm's work and can rightfully claim to have played an even more significant part in the creation of that firm.

Avriel Shull's Thornhurst MCM Addition on the National Register

2010-07-17T09:49:00.000-07:00

*Avriel Shull* has finally made it. Almost 3 years after I started work on the nomination for the Thornhurst Addition Historic District the National Park Service has recognized Thornhurst with listing on the National Register of Historic Places.

The addition is listed under Criterion C for its intact Mid-Century Modern architecture by a master designer/builder, Avriel Shull. And it's listed as an exception to the 50-years or older age requirement because, even though some of the homes are not yet 50 years old, the work is so significant it merits recognition.

Thornhurst is now Indiana's first MCM addition to be on the National Register. I'm thrilled that Marsh Davis of Indiana Landmarks asked me to research and write this project. Marsh knew about my interest and research into Mid-Century Modern design stretching back 15 years or more to when I was the owner of a 20th Century vintage modern shop, durwyn smedley 20th century, as well as a historian.

This nomination brought all my past work and research into play, and it was a hard sell requiring lots of extra research, photos, money and time. But it payed off in the end. Yeah for Indiana! Yeah for Avriel Shull! Yeah for Thornhurst!

You can read the National Register nomination here: http://1.usa.gov/btb0vj

Gunnison Magic Homes

2010-07-12T15:04:00.000-07:00

If you have a 1940s cottage or a mid-century modern home with no known builder or architect, there's a chance it could be a pre-fab Gunnison Home manufactured in a factory in New Albany, Indiana.

Foster Gunnison was a successful salesman/ designer of custom light fixtures for buildings including the Empire State Building and Waldorf Astoria in the 1920s. Then, in 1935, he translated his architectural and design knowledge into a mass production pre-fab housing factory in New Albany, Indiana. Gunnison Magic Homes, later renamed Gunnison Housing Corporation, became the housing equivalent of Ford Motors, manufacturing interchangeable parts to assemble mass-produced houses.

According to David Hounshell, who wrote, the book, "From the American System to Mass Production," Gunnison engineers designed an interchangeable wall panel that would fit 12 different house models by 1937. Gunnison could undersell a conventionally constructed house by almost 25%. A 1954 sales brochure states the homes sold for $8750 to $13,000, depending on options and floorplans, which could include breezeways and attached garages.

Competition for mass-produced, pre-fab homes was heated. Famous architects, such as Walter Gropius, worked on pre- fab home designs. In Gropius's case, for General Panel Corporation. But Gunnison and most of these other firms never really became a driving force in architecture in the 1940s and 1950s.

Gunnison employed about 300 people and claimed to have sold 4500 homes in 38 states by 1941. Gunnison was written about in Popular Science and national architecture and engineering magazines, but they aren't very well-known today outside of New Albany. They don't seem to have captured the imaginations or pocketbooks of the nation to the degree that the ubiquitious National Homes or even Lustrons did. The Gunnison plant was purchased by U.S. Steel in the 1940s and continued to produce ranch and split-level homes until 1974 in New Albany. Today, the factory is converted to a different use but you can still see Gunnison Homes in New Albany neighborhoods.

Do you have a Gunnison in your neighborhood? I think a neighborhood of these homes in good condition with original windows and siding would be eligible for the National Register. The Gunnison factory, too.

Former Gunnison factory, New Albany.

Avriel Shull and I

2010-06-22T07:58:00.000-07:00

Avriel Shull has turned into a cigarette-smoking, blue-talking, red-haired guardian angel for me. Ever since Indiana Landmarks Modern Committee hired me to write a National Register of Historic Places nomination for her Thornhurst Addition, it seems that Avriel (the one-named Cher of Indiana architecture) shows up everywhere I go.

As an example, my new beau's ex-mother-in-law was sitting shiva and when we visited to pay our respects, one of the other attendees was Howard Wolner, an Indianapolis architect who was working at the same time as Avriel in the 1950s and 1960s (Wolner is still active). I mentioned that I had been researching and writing about Avriel Shull and he had an Avriel story about building a house right next to one she was building and hearing the bluest language he'd ever heard on a construction site coming from her. I've heard that story from several others; that's classic Avriel.

Avriel has become the Kevin Bacon of Indianapolis for me. Everyone's connected to Avriel. Either they lived in one of her houses, their parent went to Herron Art School with her, they worked for her, or, as in the case of my new friend, Keith, traced her drawings as a high school student! Everyone seems to have known Avriel. Everyone but me, that is.

But I'm getting to know her and the more I research and write about her, the better I like getting to know her. The National Register nomination is at the National Park Service waiting on confirmation to become the first Mid-Century Modern historic district in Indiana. But I'm still learning about her, researching and writing about her. So if you have an Avriel story, please share it with me. Avriel died in 1976 but her spirit definitely lives on in the many, many Avriel buildings and even more Avriel stories.

That picture up there, that's the first home Avriel built in Thornhurst Addition. Cool, huh?

Inspirer, yes it is!

2010-06-12T14:25:00.001-07:00

We got a long visit at the North Christian Church in Columbus today. I'm attaching a few of the host of shots I took at this Eero Saarinen-designed church which is one of the National Historic Landmarks in this town. Built in 1964, this building is sometimes affectionately called the Oil Can.
The church newsletter is called The Inspirer. Apt name for this glorious building, too. Believer or not, it's an inspiring, grand space. Here are three quick views from the Dan Kiley landscape, looking into the sanctuary, and looking into the chapel through the screen behind the baptismal pool.

Columbus bridges the gap in style

2010-06-11T13:59:00.001-07:00

Columbus is home to extraordinary buildings. According to Wikipedia, a source I am using only because this is a quickfire post, 6 of this city's buildings are National Historic Landmarks. That's a big step up even from being listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and several of these buildings made NHL status before they have reached 50 years of age. Which means they are so exceptional, they were listed even before they reached the normal age to even be CONSIDERED for listing!

There are also extraordinarily cool bridges bringing one into the city from the blahness of the I-65 interstate interchange. Check out these two bridges, shot from my car window as I arrived on this rainy day. Both were designed by J. Muller International. And the Gateway Arch (first pic) is owned by INDOT! Why doesn't INDOT have sexy bridges everywhere? Because not everywhere is Columbus...

Stay tuned for more Columbus posts as this Bloggers' Architecture Tour gets underway. You can follow along on Twitter at #COLMCM

Discovering Columbus

2010-06-11T09:36:00.000-07:00

(image from the Columbus Convention and Visitors Bureau webpage)

Columbus, Indiana, you sweet Midwestern hot spot of modern design, here I come. And not just me: 15 modern architecture/MCM/design bloggers are on their way to walk and talk about you! Keep your eyes posted here for updates and follow along on twitter at #COLMCM

Evans Woollen, the Minton-Capehart Federal Building, and the Circle

2010-06-04T09:49:00.000-07:00

Last night I had the opportunity to see and hear Evans Woollen speak for the second time in just a few months. And what a pleasure that was. (See my blog post below about Woollen at New Harmony.)

The lecture at the Indianapolis Museum of Art was more formal than the panel discussion that included Woollen at New Harmony. And it was packed full of more Woollen goodness.

I took notes, but unfortunately some of the most interesting stuff came during the lights-out portion of the talk when Woollen was discussing slides of the Minton-Capehart Federal Building in Indianapolis. This is a building that is often maligned in Indianapolis but its very simple aesthetic has always pleased me. I've written about it before for the Urban Times. (You can see that article here: http://www.urbantimesonline.com/?p=822)

Woollen's insights made me appreciate it even more.

Here are some of the bits of architectural history that one rarely gets to hear straight from the horse's (architect's) mouth.

Woollen and his partners landed the federal contract from the General Services Administration, which was primarily building tall towers at the time. Woollen talked the feds into allowing his firm to basically squish a tower into a shorter, wider footprint that would help to frame the American Legion Mall and allow for use of the entire block without rising taller than the War Memorial across the street.

Thus the inverted ziggurat shape of the building. He talked about "weaving the building like a tapestry" to get the window placement just right and as minimalist as possible so that it would pay homage to the two grand buildings framing the mall on other sides, the Scottish Rite Cathedral and the War Memorial, both of which have few windows. Woollen also spoke about making sure the concrete in the Brutalism style Federal Building would match the limestone color in these two older buildings, and about his desire to design a new building that would be "subservient" to these historic edifices. His modern design was inspired by the Saarinen American Embassy building in London.

He also spoke about the Milton Glazier graphic that acts as a mural on the first story of the building. It was Woollen's idea to have a painting that "wrapped around the building." He wanted something like a "continuous Rothko" but he couldn't find anyone who could grasp the idea or who would take the assignment until he talked to Glazier. The now-famous graphic artist made that painting his own with vertical bands of vibrant colors. Those colors, which have now faded to pastels, showed up boldly and brightly in the vintage kodachromes of Woollen's slides.

What a delight to hear of the careful, thoughtful approach this man took to a building that has not been loved in this city. Earlier in his talk, Woollen said that "sometimes a building is despised at the beginning and loved at the end, or vice versa. I will abide by the end." I hope that his talk last night converts at least a few more Indianapolis residents to an appreciation of his federal building and I wonder if more of us will grow to love it over time.

Oh, Woollen answered a question about the proposed closure of the Circle to vehicles (see my recent blog post about that below). He says he was for it in 1955 and he's for it now. I cut him some slack on that opinion though. He's only human. He can't get everything right.

The Circle is Unbroken

2010-05-30T07:59:00.000-07:00

Weighing in on closing Monument Circle to traffic has become the subject du jour for bloggers and opinionators across the city. For a recent opinion piece by the "Star" reporter, Matthew Tully see http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=20105260385.

Closing the Circle to vehicular traffic is one of the most numbskull ideas to gain traction in this city in a long time. When Carmel is gaining national recognition for its innovative roundabouts, we're closing one right in the heart of our city. That Circle is a natural traffic calming device. It forces drivers to slow down and take a look. And there is plenty going on so there's always a lot to take a gander at when driving on the Circle.

The Circle also allows for parking directly in front of the few retail businesses that have made a stake on or near it. And we all know Hoosiers need to park within eyesight of their destination or they simply won't go there. So, as others have pointed out, closing the Circle to traffic and therefore to parking will kill the businesses that are there.

It also makes no sense in terms of drawing more people. The Circle is full of people almost all the time. Even on Sundays when there are very few business reasons to be there, people are all over the place. Sitting on the Monument, drinking their Starbucks, eating their burritos.

Given its popularity already as a pedestrian hangout, we gain nothing from making it a pedestrian mall. That is such a tired idea already. It was tried all over the state in the 70s and 80s and it virtually killed downtown areas like the one in Richmond, Indiana. Pedestrian malls are a failed revitalization tool. And Monument Circle doesn't need revitalization.

The Circle is already often closed for special events, which makes them seem very special indeed. The word "special" implies something that isn't ordinary. Making the Circle ordinary is the last thing we should be considering and closing it makes those special events not so special after all.

The Circle has been the heart of the city and part of what makes it so alive is the traffic that flows through it. People slowly driving around it get a gander at that extraordinary exclamation point at the center of an old city plan. And the Circle's history is that it has always been used for vehicular traffic, as well as pedestrian activity.

When I heard about this lamebrained idea it made me remember a meeting I attended when I was heading up the Mass Ave Merchants Association about 10 years ago. This was a meeting for the Indianapolis Downtown Inc. Marketing Board. At that time, the board included managers from all the downtown hotels, a representative from IUPUI, people from the Dept. of Metropolitan Development, folks from the Indianapolis Convention and Visitors Bureau, downtown realtors and others who were busy trying to sell Indianapolis as a destination.

At this particular meeting Kurt Flock, a downtown real estate agent, asked the members of the board how many lived downtown. Out of probably 50 people making their livings promoting downtown, 4 of us (including Kurt and me) lifted our hands in answer to that question. Kurt then asked: "what would it take to get the rest of you to move here?" The first answer was the most memorable. It came from a representative of the ICVA: "cul de sacs."

Well, here we are making a cul de sac out of the Circle. So I guess he's getting his wish.

People, cul de sacs belong in the suburbs not in the center of our urban city. Until the people who market our city get that idea into their suburban brains I guess we'll continue to see these suburban planning notions creeping into the city center. Pretty soon we'll be an extension of Carmel and Zionsville, Greenwood and Brownsburg.

Then I'll be moving to a city.

New Harmony, Evans Woollen and Architecture

2010-04-16T11:23:00.000-07:00

Last week the annual Indiana preserva-tion conference, with the new name of Preserving Historic Places, took place in New Harmony, Indiana. I have an incredible fondness for New Harmony. The site of two failed 19th Century Utopian communities, it is very close to an architectural Utopia with amazing buildngs from the 1810s to the 1990s. The Rappite architecture beginning in 1815 includes lovely log cabins with innovative insulation and air lock entries to keep the cold Indiana winds from blowing into the houses. Their brick community buildings are resplendent.

The residential buildings of the Owenite years, and the grand Workingman's Institute and Thrall's Opera House, are equally beautiful. And the Victorian era, after the Utopian failures, was also kind to this small town, leaving grand and modest homes and a beautiful downtown commercial area.

Even tiny infill ranches from the 1950s are sweet in New Harmony. Mid-Century Modern has a small voice, as well.

Then Jane Owen, starting in the 1970s has given us the Richard Meier Athenaeum, a building memorable enough to be listed on Meier's biography, and the Philip Johnson Roofless Church. Proclaimed by Johnson protege, Dean of the School of Architecture at University of Houston---and soon to be New Harmony resident---Joe Mashburn,`to be one of Johnson's best buildings.

The town amazes me and is reason enough for a visit. But there was so much more.

Included in the offerings for the conference was a talk by Bernhard Karpf,associate partner of Richard Meier & Partners, about the Athenaeum.

But the two star performances of the conference were the panel discussion by Joe Mashburn, Bernhard Karpf and Evans Woollen and, of course, the keynote address by Paul Goldberger, the architecture critic for the New Yorker. I may talk about Goldberger some other time. For me the funnest moment came in the panel discussion with Mashburn, Woollen and Karpf (that's Woollen in the center of the picture).

After brief introductions, and a few planned questions the moderator turned the questioning over to the crowd. I screwed up my courage and asked the last question of the day:

"Richard Meier said that light is one of his favorite building materials. If each of you had to come up with one sentence like that to describe your own work, what would you say?"

Berhard Karpf punted on this question, claiming to not have much architecture to draw conclusions from. Mashburn said that he and his partner (his wife) relied on the power of the landscape to shape their thoughts about what should be built. And Karpf made the intersting point that well-known architects all possess one similar trait, which is that they "are all good marketers." They know how to talk about their work in order to get other people talking about and appreciating it. He also confessed that he didn't really appreciate Philip Johnson's work. [perhaps a bit snarky considering the company]

But the big payoff was getting this answer from the leprechaunish Evans Woollen, one of my Indianapolis architect heroes:

"For me, every building is a whole new venture into a different context, different community. My buildings are crazily different from each other. I've been criticized for that but it's not an accident. My buildings are purposely inconsistent." Woollen used the New Harmony Inn as an example. He built that building to blend into the landscape. It was not intended to stand out and compete but to harmonize with New Harmony. And that it does. And there's a little insight into an interesting modernist architect's brain.

Oh Carmel, you hurt my eyes!

2010-04-06T19:40:00.000-07:00

Drove to Carmel, Indiana, today to take a picture of the first home that Avriel Shull, a modern home designer/builder, constructed in that town when she was 23. Her house, the Golden Unicorn, holds up well as a design, despite its age. The Golden Unicorn, named for the animal Avriel mounted by the door was built in 1955 as I recall.

What doesn't work as a design statement in that town is the new construction going up along Rangeline Road. Ouch! My eyes hurt when I see all the cribbed fake historic building styles jammed into this one hulking behemoth of a building.
Why? With the funds that Carmel has available and that Mayor Brainard is willing to spend, why put money into a cobbled together copy of old architectural styles? Wouldn't it be great if Carmel would spend its municipal funds on great new, Modern architecture? Instead of copying a Palladian design for your Performing Arts Center, why not a Calatrava or even a Gehry?

With the funding muscle that Carmel can muster, even with a mayor embattled over his budgets, why shouldn't that town be the next midwestern mecca of modern design? Show us something new. Spend your money on fabulous, even controversial designs, not on hackneyed copies of buildings with designs that look more or less like styles from more than 100 years ago. Carmel seems to be the main player in the public architectural game around here these days. It's sad that they are playing it so safe and uninterestingly.