|
Post by richard on Nov 11, 2006 14:35:52 GMT -5
Richard, speaking of those brick sidewalks on Washington Street...I wasn't here when that project happened. I take it that, for those residents that bought the bricks (didn't they cost somewhere around $25?), the city provided a map of sorts to let them know where their brick was located. Is that true? David, as it’s been several years, I’ve not found our records, but I do think you’re correct about the cost being around $25.00. I do not believe a map was provided. I do think a map for The Veterans Memorial bricks was provided by a young man as a Scout or Senior project. The sidewalks were installed in phases and the bricks were sold for each phase. At the end of each construction phase, it was common to see several families walking, with heads down, reading each brick as they attempted to locate their brick!
|
|
Babs
HCI Forum Board Member
Posts: 589
|
Post by Babs on Nov 12, 2006 12:04:43 GMT -5
Richard never did tell us but the sign for these "largest tenderloins in town" is located outside Kramer's on Central Avenue, just South of 17th Street. :-)
|
|
RER
HCI Forum Board Member
"Democracy & Freedom"
Posts: 2,462
|
Post by RER on Nov 12, 2006 15:44:29 GMT -5
"Columbus North High School 2006"The trees and outdoor benches are older than today's students
|
|
Babs
HCI Forum Board Member
Posts: 589
|
Post by Babs on Nov 12, 2006 17:03:02 GMT -5
Bob, Wonderful pictures of Columbus North. (I still am curious where you get all these terrific photos to post. ) Anyhow, thanks for posting them and doesn't the new field look great! It was just completed a short while ago, as I remember driving by the North end (27th Street) while it was in the process of being redone.
|
|
|
Post by richard on Nov 13, 2006 12:46:53 GMT -5
The A. Tross Building today.
|
|
|
Post by richard on Nov 13, 2006 12:48:11 GMT -5
The A. Tross Sign, still displayed today.
|
|
|
Post by richard on Nov 13, 2006 12:49:27 GMT -5
Here is the detail of the roof line of the A. Tross building today.
|
|
|
Post by Ricky_Berkey on Nov 14, 2006 6:53:24 GMT -5
Thanx for that picture. I don't think I had ever taken a really close look at the top of the A. Tross building. It always pays to look up! Here is the detail of the roof line of the A. Tross building today.
|
|
Babs
HCI Forum Board Member
Posts: 589
|
Post by Babs on Nov 14, 2006 10:52:48 GMT -5
Friday fireworks! Head for the Fair Oaks Mall around 6:30 this Friday if you'd like to catch a glimpse of Santa Claus coming to town. QMIX Christmas Musical Fireworks starts at 6:30 and Santa will make his entrance afterwards. The mall will remain open until 10 p.m.
|
|
Babs
HCI Forum Board Member
Posts: 589
|
Post by Babs on Nov 14, 2006 14:28:32 GMT -5
Really interesting article in today's Republic by Harry McCawley. I had trouble getting this posted today, so Sir Richard to the rescue one more time. Thanks Richard.
Architecture loses beauty when it outlives function
By Harry McCawley Associate Editor
IN the wee hours of Monday morning, an Indianapolis architectural landmark tumbled to the ground in a wimpy bang.
The old control tower at Indianapolis International Airport was demolished as part of a five-year expansion project at the airport.
The timing of the 1 a.m. demolition had nothing to do with the structure's landmark status.
It got that status because of the man who designed it … I.M. Pei.
The demolition got little attention, because there just aren't too many people aware that an icon of international architecture had dreamed it up. An Associated Press story didn't even mention Pei.
But the story does have some interest in Columbus, home of another Pei creation, the Bartholomew County Library.
The interest comes at a time when the city is confronting decisions about what some architectural purists might consider blasphemy.
It looks like Columbus is on the verge of tearing down or seriously changing some of its architectural masterpieces.
A couple of key elements in the Vision 20/20 plans for a new downtown include the necessity of demolishing the post office and seriously redoing the Commons.
Both buildings are important fixtures on the Visitors Center architectural tour and are among the most written about structures in national architectural journals.
They're relatively young. The post office dates to 1970, the Commons to 1973.
Both were designed by architects who are considered building artists - Kevin Roche did the post office and Cesar Pelli the Commons.
Eye on city
The discussions about the fate of the two buildings have gotten national attention.
In a sub-story to a piece about Columbus architecture in Dwell magazine this summer, writer John King reported on the possible fate of the two buildings under the headline "Goodbye, Columbus."
So far, local reaction to the loss of the post office and the remaking of the Commons has been muted.
No one has chained themselves to a pillar at the post office and there are some who are disappointed the Commons will only be changed and not demolished.
Not popular
Truth is, neither of the two buildings is very popular. The post office has had enough headaches with the rust stains on the pillars, the leaky roof and the pigeons that leave their signatures on the sidewalk but it also has one of the most ill-conceived usage plans in town. A semitrailer must turn into a pretzel to squeeze into the post office's parking lot.
The Commons, of course, has never outlived the Red Square tag.
That said, these are still the works of two men many consider to be artists.
Would anyone dare suggest that we rip up a Picasso or take a sledge hammer to a Michelangelo?
Putting aside the logic that a Picasso painting takes up only a fraction of the space occupied by the post office, it still seems weird that less than 40 years after we put up this architectural work of art at Fourth and Jackson streets we are talking about tearing it down.
I'm not sure what it says about Columbus' architectural program, the people who live here, architecture in general or society.
It's especially ironic that while we're talking about tearing down the post office after 36 years, the courthouse is working on its 132nd year and several other downtown buildings are doing quite nicely after more than a century.
Imagine how it would be taken if someone proposed tearing down the courthouse.
Tradition vs. today
Some people might cast the whole discussion as a continuation of this community's ongoing struggle between traditionalists who have lived here a long time, happy with the way things are, and more contemporary residents, some of whom have also lived here a long time but like change.
The traditionalists might take this new direction as proof that the contemporary architecture movement was just a passing phase.
More practical people however, might see it as a natural part of evolution - a survival of the fittest.
Those buildings that have survived for so long have the advantage of durability. Let's face it, a lot of Columbus' buildings in recent years have been designed for a shelf life of 30 years - tops.
Many of them became antiquated because of changing needs. My goodness, we had to move the press out of the front window of The Republic because it was too small for our printing needs.
But there have been some "contemporary" buildings that are approaching the status of traditional. First Christian Church, for instance, would be an unlikely candidate for a date with a wrecking ball. Neither would North Christian.
Truth is, architecture in Columbus is like all other forms of art. It's in the eyes of the beholder.
|
|
|
Post by David Sechrest on Nov 15, 2006 8:24:12 GMT -5
In the Harry McCawley article that Babs posted yesterday, Harry made mention of an article entitled "Goodbye Columbus." [SIDE NOTE, added November 15th] Wouldn't you just know that someone else wrote an article with the same Title? When I first posted this last night, I confused this article with the one Harry spoke of in his newspaper column. The following has nothing to do with the article mentioned in Harry's column, but interesting just the same... Goodbye, Columbus Modernism failed to save the Indiana town that architecture famously built. By Philip Nobel Posted June 19, 2006 What is architecture for? Shelter, sure: something to keep the rain off, to frustrate the bugs, to make space where there was none before. That’s got to be job one. But it doesn’t hold anyone’s interest for very long. Maybe symbolism follows? Using form and ornament to tell a story or to set a mood? To send a message of power or plenty? To divert and inspire? Those are other road-tested functions for buildings, things that architecture clearly can achieve. It can also, aggregated, give a street wall or even a city a particular flavor or effect. But can it save the world?
J. Irwin Miller thought that architecture could save the world—or at least his small corner of it: Columbus, Indiana. His is one of the great creative patronage stories in all of Modern architecture. In 1942 Eliel Saarinen completed a new building there for the First Christian congregation—a brilliant spare composition in beige brick and translucent glass that may be the finest Modernist church in the country. It was also the first modern building of any type in Columbus, and as it is sited just across from the family’s mansion downtown, Miller had plenty of time to look it over. He was smitten with the church—and with what the building had done to the vitality of his small, somewhat remote town. In a sense, it was “Bilbao,” albeit sacred not secular, 55 years before Bilbao.
Beginning in 1957—after a few more Modernist buildings had taken root, including an exquisite branch for the family’s bank by Eero Saarinen—Miller initiated a program that sought to tap that same energy, but for schools. As the head of Cummins Engine Company—by far the largest and most robust employer in the area—he was a civic father in the old mold, the fate of his wealth linked inextricably to the state of his town. Faced with poor conditions at a local school, Miller decided to take matters into his own hands, hiring Harry Weese (the genius behind Washington, D.C.’s Metro, here in his young buck phase) to design another. Weese’s Modern campus of low peak-roofed sheds proved so popular that the relationship between Cummins and the schools was soon made official: for all new buildings the company would pick up the architect’s fees, encouraging the town in this way to seek out the very best talent.
What started with the schools soon spread to other public construction—post offices, firehouses, the local hospital, and city hall itself. And just as Miller had been inspired by Saarinen’s church, patrons not eligible for the official Cummins sponsorship fell in line and hired the cream of the American midcentury crop. Today this town of 40,000 is famed as a museum of Modern architecture in that just post-orthodox phase, with significant (if suitably small) buildings by Cesar Pelli, I. M. Pei, Kevin Roche, Richard Meier, James Polshek, Charles Gwathmey, John Johansen, Robert Venturi, Gunnar Birkerts, Edward Larrabee Barnes, John Carl Warnecke, the Architects Collaborative, and SOM, in addition to the many by Weese and several by the younger Saarinen. The place only lacks a Paul Rudolph and a Philip Johnson to make it a truly encyclopedic collection from the period in which architects were shedding the formal dogmas of Modern architecture but not yet its social code: the belief that good buildings, properly deployed, could make new cities great and reform dying ones—architecture could save the world.
The utopianism at the heart of the Modern movement was hard to shake. Put enough towers-in-the-park or elegant “functional” buildings in a city, the original thinking went, and the net humanistic uplift that ensued would make a paradise on earth. The mental hygiene of the masses (as we were always seen by the likes of Le Corbusier) would improve apace with the ordering of the metropolis along radiant boulevards. Glass towers and happy citizens; oh, it would have been good to live in the Modern future.
That vision died a thousand deaths, of course—500 due, say, to its interpretation by Stalin’s heirs in Eastern Europe; the rest in the West, in places like the banlieus of Paris or Minoru Yamasaki’s imploded Pruitt-Igoe and all the other housing projects just like it that survived only to live on as reminders of Modernism’s failure to society at scales larger than a single building. Still, at that single-building scale the idea that architecture can save and heal was tenacious.
Miller drank that Kool-Aid. Presiding over the 1964 dedication of a golf club to which Cummins Engine had donated the construction costs, he made his intentions clear. “Why should an industrial company, organized for profit, think it a good and right thing to take a million dollars, and more, of that profit, and give it to this community in the form of this golf course and clubhouse?” he asked, no doubt echoing his shareholders’ concerns. “The answer is that we would like to see the community come to be…the best community of its size in the country.”
Did it? Though last year the town was listed by USA Today among the “10 Great Places to Discover Midwest Charm,” it exhibits the full spectrum of less than charming attributes associated with such places. The downtown is, for all intents and purposes, dead. Even a restaurant there that once made a guide of Indiana’s best has joined the row of shuttered businesses. This fate was hastened by the construction in 1973 of a bronze-glass downtown mall (designed by shopping-center pioneers Gruen Associates) years before the Wal-Mart alit out by the intersection of Taylor Road and Route 31. Cruising those thoroughfares, predictably, one finds the rest of the town as it is actually lived in: the fast food, the Kohl’s, the Lowe’s—all the interchangeable parts of our interchangeable sprawl.
The heart of the town is dense—built as it was full of modest workers’ housing on small lots—but, deprived of commerce, it can’t sustain street life. Instead one finds a lot of rot and ramshackle, and ample evidence, in the occasional passing wraith, of that other newly typical Midwestern charmer: the meth head. According to local police records, drug arrests are up 523 percent since 2001. Seventy-three methamphetamine labs were eliminated in the same period.
Certainly it’s not the fault of the town’s great Modern buildings that Columbus has fallen prey to the same commercial and pharmaceutical scourges that have plagued less designerly burgs. But it does cast Miller’s vision, and the wisdom of the Cummins patronage system, into doubt. Miller made Columbus beautiful in spots with his Modernist faith and his money. But try this thinking problem: imagine for a moment that, instead of backing the creation of individual structures imbued with what was already at that moment a dying creed, Miller had truly thought outside the glass-and-steel box. Would Columbus not be a better place today had all that energy and funding gone into, say, a concerted program of creative urban planning—the best minds focused on the creation of the best space, achieved through the invisible, unsexy means of zoning and finance and codes? The town might not look as cool—it would be deprived of the income that architourism brings—but it might be a safer and happier place to live.The article came from the following link: www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=2122
|
|
Babs
HCI Forum Board Member
Posts: 589
|
Post by Babs on Nov 15, 2006 10:06:49 GMT -5
According to a blurb in the Republic this morning, the Irwin Home and Garden is in the lead for the 7 Wonders of Columbus.
If you'd like to cast your vote for this list go to therepublic.com and vote. There is a list of various buildings, etc. or you can write in another point of interest to you.
|
|
Babs
HCI Forum Board Member
Posts: 589
|
Post by Babs on Nov 15, 2006 10:21:42 GMT -5
A few days ago I posted about an upcoming tv show that features Columbus. This show will air at 8 p.m. on Thursday (tomorrow) night, November 16th on DishTV network, channel 9472. Footage will include the Bartholomew County Library, First Christian Church, and the Memorial for Veterans. Filmed by a joint British and American crew. Harry McCawley provided the background about our community to the crew.
|
|
|
Post by Ricky_Berkey on Nov 15, 2006 11:43:23 GMT -5
There were only 15 buildings to choose from although they gave you a line for a write in vote. Here are your choices. Zaharako's Hope town Square Hope Moravian Cemetery Irwin Home and Gardens Memorial Gym (North High School) Bartholomew County Courthouse The Crump The Commons Second Street Bridge First Christian Church Mill Race Park Memorial for Veterans Henry Moore's "Large Arch (library plaza) People Trails Cummins Plant 1 According to a blurb in the Republic this morning, the Irwin Home and Garden is in the lead for the 7 Wonders of Columbus. If you'd like to cast your vote for this list go to therepublic.com and vote. There is a list of various buildings, etc. or you can write in another point of interest to you.
|
|
Babs
HCI Forum Board Member
Posts: 589
|
Post by Babs on Nov 17, 2006 10:15:21 GMT -5
Any plans for the day? The Fireman's Fund is having their annual cookoff today at the Commons beginning at 11 a.m. and serving until the chili is gone (usually around 1:30). Why not head to the Commons for lunch? You will be supporting the Cheer Fund, which has a goal of $75,000 this year. For $5.00, you will get a great lunch(chili, a drink and a cookie) and be helping some needy children have a happier Christmas!
|
|
RER
HCI Forum Board Member
"Democracy & Freedom"
Posts: 2,462
|
Post by RER on Nov 17, 2006 21:42:57 GMT -5
"Some of the mostly famous architects who have designed Columbus, Indiana buildings" _______________________________________________________________ Richard Meier — Born 1934. American architect noted for technically innovative designs that blend with natural environments. Best-known works include High Museum in Atlanta and Getty Center in Los Angeles. The 1984 recipient of the international Pritzker Architecture Prize. I.M. Pei — Born 1917. Chinese-born American architect whose designs include the East Building of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. (1978), and the pyramid entrance to the Louvre in Paris (1989). The 1983 Pritzker recipient. Kevin Roche — Born 1922, Dublin, Ireland. The 1982 Pritzker recipient. Designed Oakland Museum and Ford Foundation in New York City. Eliel Saarinen — 1873–1950. Finnish-American architect and city planner. Major works include the Helsinki railway station; Crow Island Elementary School, Winnetka, Ill. (1939); two churches in Columbus, Ind. (1941–42) and Minneapolis (1949); and the music shed for the Berkshire Festival at Tanglewood, Mass. Later designs were made in collaboration with his son, Eero. Eero Saarinen — 1910–1961. Finnish-born American architect whose designs include the General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Mich. (1951–1955) and the Trans World Airlines terminal at Kennedy Airport in New York City (1962). Harry Weese — 1915-1998. American architect who studied at Cranbrook Academy in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., with Eliel Saarinen. Opened his office in Chicago, first as Baldwin and Weese, and after 1947 as Harry Weese and Associates. Designed Chicago's Abelson Auditorium.
QUESTION TO ALL VIEWERS: Can you name the buildings or structures in Columbus that the above architects designed ?
Bob
|
|
Babs
HCI Forum Board Member
Posts: 589
|
Post by Babs on Nov 18, 2006 8:17:58 GMT -5
Bob, Elliel Saarinen designed First Christian Church and Eero Sarrinen designed Irwin Union Bank.
I.M. Pei designed our library.
|
|
RER
HCI Forum Board Member
"Democracy & Freedom"
Posts: 2,462
|
Post by RER on Nov 18, 2006 8:20:54 GMT -5
That is right Babs now how about the other three ?
Bob
|
|
Babs
HCI Forum Board Member
Posts: 589
|
Post by Babs on Nov 18, 2006 8:23:35 GMT -5
My oops, I modified and added I. M. Pei after I thought about it, so only three to go? Hey for someone who didn't live here for over 25 years, three out of six isn't too bad is it? :-)
And a happy Saturday to one and all...................
|
|
RER
HCI Forum Board Member
"Democracy & Freedom"
Posts: 2,462
|
Post by RER on Nov 18, 2006 8:27:32 GMT -5
Babs: Well you are doing better than I did before, I studied Columbus over the past year or so. I have not lived there for over 45years. Ha, ha, ha ...........but you are doing great and only 3 to go...... INSERT HELP HERE: Richard Meier and Partners created the Clifty Creek Elementary School in 1982. Meier went on to build the billion dollar Getty Museum in Los Angeles and Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art. GO HERE TO SEE PICTURES OF THE SCHOOL TODAY:www.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/colsmeier/colsmeier.htmlTWO REMAINING: Kevin Roche and Harry Weese THEY ARE: Kevin Roche Cummins complex buildings downtown down old Jackson Street areas. He also helped with the design of the Irwin Union Bank on Washington Street. Harry Weese designed the First Baptist Church. Bob
|
|