Late last year, the scaffolding that had been wrapping a structure that stands as part of what is arguably the most emblematic work of Modernist architecture in Columbus, Indiana—a town that famously suffers no shortage of it—came down after a $3.2 million restoration project: the 166-foot-tall freestanding tower at Eliel Saarinen’s First Christian Church.
Located opposite I.M. Pei’s downtown Columbus–anchoring Library Plaza (1971), First Christian Church is one of only two churches in the United States designed by the Finnish-American architect along with the later, similar Christ Church Lutheran in Minneapolis. Completed in 1942, when Saarinen was director of Michigan’s Cranbrook Academy of Art, the church, with its asymmetrical design and lack of stained glass windows, is considered the first contemporary building to rise in Columbus. In subsequent decades, the small Midwestern city emerged as an unlikely hotbed of Modernist architecture thanks to industrialist J. Irwin Miller, chairman and CEO of the Cummins Corporation, and the architecture-commissioning arm of his company’s namesake foundation.
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