Columbus, Indiana
I moved down to Bloomington, about an hour south of Indianapolis, last summer. Indy's a neat city, but I keep finding myself going over to Columbus, about forty minutes east of here, when I want to walk around and look at a town.
I'm from Louisville in Kentucky originally (about an hour from Columbus), and I remember going to my best friend's grandparents' lake house in Columbus with his family a few times when I was six or seven. All I really remember about it was it being on a lake. But Columbus is actually apparently quite well known for its architecture.
The Cummins diesel engine company is based out of Columbus, and the story I've heard is that either its current owner or the one before it was a huge architecture enthusiast. So when the city needed to build some new schools and civic buildings, he said to them, "choose your architect from this list of ten architects I like, and I'll pay the architect's fees for you." So now Columbus, this town of maybe thirty thousand people in the middle of nowhere, is full of this fantastic 1950s/1960s Modernist architecture. And then I guess the people building things later decided to just go with it, because the city is full of sculpture just because and really unusual buildings that seem like they're being odd to fit in. I've gone down and looked at all the churches (there are three or four churches that are super Modern too) and civic buildings, but this is from when I went and just sort of wandered around downtown for a couple hours.
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I'm from Louisville in Kentucky originally (about an hour from Columbus), and I remember going to my best friend's grandparents' lake house in Columbus with his family a few times when I was six or seven. All I really remember about it was it being on a lake. But Columbus is actually apparently quite well known for its architecture.
The Cummins diesel engine company is based out of Columbus, and the story I've heard is that either its current owner or the one before it was a huge architecture enthusiast. So when the city needed to build some new schools and civic buildings, he said to them, "choose your architect from this list of ten architects I like, and I'll pay the architect's fees for you." So now Columbus, this town of maybe thirty thousand people in the middle of nowhere, is full of this fantastic 1950s/1960s Modernist architecture. And then I guess the people building things later decided to just go with it, because the city is full of sculpture just because and really unusual buildings that seem like they're being odd to fit in. I've gone down and looked at all the churches (there are three or four churches that are super Modern too) and civic buildings, but this is from when I went and just sort of wandered around downtown for a couple hours.
( Read more... )