Sept. 11, 2025 Ι Bloomberg CityLab
When a solar eclipse passed through Columbus, Indiana, in May 1994, fifth-grader Josh Mings watched the cosmic ballet from the atrium of Southside Elementary School, a hulking Brutalist structure designed by architect Eliot Noyes. Completed in 1969, it’s among the town’s most famous — and daring — examples of midcentury modernist architecture.
Seeing the moon occlude the sun amid the bunker-like building’s monumental slabs of raw concrete sounds like a scene from Dune, but it was a pretty normal experience for kids in Columbus, a small city in southern Indiana that boasts scores of architectural landmarks from the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s.
Mings’ time at Southside was just one experience in Columbus that stoked his design imagination. This is a town of 50,000 where fire stations are designed by Pritzker Prize laureates and everyone knows the name of their school’s architect — a group that include luminaries of midcentury modernism like Harry Weese, Gunnar Birkerts, and Edward Larrabee Barnes. “It was a combination of experiencing all of these spaces that ended up with my wanting to be an architect,” he says. Today, Mings runs his own Chicago architecture firm (and is a committed Brutalism connoisseur).
Columbus owes its status as a mecca of modernism to its largest employer, diesel engine manufacturer Cummins. In 1950s, the company’s chairman and CEO J. Irwin Miller established a foundation to pay top-flight modernist architects to design more than a dozen of the city’s public schools. The program was later expanded to include all public buildings, and over time, Columbus became something like an enlightened factory town that channeled its corporate wealth into tastemaking civic design.
Today, the Landmark Columbus Foundation keeps Miller’s cultural vision alive, sponsoring exhibitions and programming celebrating the city’s modernist legacy with Exhibit Columbus, a biennial event that commissions semi-permanent architectural installations from designers and academics.
The town’s trove of 20th century architecture has given people in Columbus “an elaborate vocabulary of architecture based on what’s in their backyard,” says Eric Höweler, of Boston-based architecture firm Höweler + Yoon, who’s designing a new school in Columbus.
Höweler’s new school is just one piece of a much larger $306 million funding package called Envision 2030 that the local school district, Bartholomew Consolidated School Corporation (BCSC), will use to renovate essentially all of its facilities — and build a new one. It’s the largest single package of school renovations the district has taken on. Given the historic significance of these buildings, each is rife with thorny preservation issues, made all the more sensitive because these buildings are the most democratic and accessible touchpoints in the town’s portfolio of trendsetting modernism.
Decades from now, “I want [Envision 2030] to be seen as representative of the way that this community invests in public spaces,” says BCSC Superintendent Chad Phillips.
A lot has changed in the decades since the Columbus program began, from teaching practices to education policy. These buildings rose amid a postwar surge in school construction; they’re being renovated at a time when classrooms are roiled by culture war debates, funding cuts and security fears. The next chapter in Columbus’s public schools will have to maintain this education infrastructure’s status as communal, civic forums in an era when American public education itself is under siege. Adapting these quintessentially mid-20th-century spaces to serve students today stands to be a challenge that goes beyond design.
Spaces of Wonder
The architect leading the renovation effort is Indianapolis-based CSO, a firm with a deep well of education experience in the district. The company’s principal, Jim Funk, describes their task as “if anything, to make it better.”
At some schools, the updates look to draw on the historical legacy of the buildings in ways that better match current pedagogy; at others, function and preservation are more at odds.
“Landmarks Columbus has [helped] us honor the architectural and design tradition of the buildings while making the teaching and learning spaces into the flexible kind of space that we need today,” says Phillips, the superintendent. Renovating the buildings is a sustainability win, too: “Because of the quality of design and construction, we’re reinvesting in buildings that are 50 to 60 years old with the intention of them lasting 30 more years.”
There are several common elements seen across the suite of Envision 2030 renovations: an emphasis on places for STEM programming, consolidated student wellness centers, collaborative student work spaces, and room for supplemental services. These last two programs are the most consistent element of completed and under-construction projects, located in what CSO calls “activity commons.”
This job is perhaps most difficult at L. Frances Smith Elementary School. Designed by John M. Johansen and opened in 1969, it’s easily one of the strangest elementary schools ever built: It’s been described as a “cubist grain elevator” and “freaked-out soybean factory.” A series of heavy concrete pavilions containing classrooms are connected by brightly painted accordion-textured steel tunnels that run across more than half a dozen levels. It’s equal parts sci-fi, whimsical and austere.
The design is widely loved by children — students often return after graduation to “run the tunnels” says the school’s principal, Casey Voelz. If children’s brains are sparked by novelty, Smith Elementary has it, along with a confidence to ignore precedent in a way that’s rare in architecture.
But after more than 50 years, the building’s eccentricities are uncompromising in some pretty annoying ways. The original tunnels, made of little more than steel and drywall, are poorly insulated and prone to leaks and corrosion. Steeply pitched walkways hamper accessibility, and wayfinding can be a challenge.
CSO’s firm’s plan will preserve the Habitrail tunnels — and even add another one to ease the load on the most traveled hallway. Meanwhile, an outdoor courtyard currently defined by the tunnels will be enclosed and converted into a library and media center. It’s a notable change in function, but enclosure will help address the insulation issue.
The collaborative activity commons CSO is installing at Smith are located in “nodule” joints where tunnels converge, and classrooms will be converted into these spaces as well. While these spaces will host student-led small group work, they are also places where students can get additional services and tutoring “and not always interrupt the classroom,” says Voelz, such as English-learner instruction, special education and early reading interventions. With flexible, collaborative spaces between classrooms and dispersed across the building, “services come to the kids instead of kids going to the services,” says Funk.
Instead of oral recitation and rote memorization, today’s BCSC teachers wanted “an inquiry-based classroom with stations where students can share, wonder, discuss, record, observe, collaborate and make,” according to Landmark Columbus Foundation researcher Glenda Winders, who is compiling the definitive design history of Columbus’ public schools. Transparency is key here, and glass walls allow students to leave the classroom for self-directed study in activity commons with just enough independence and supervision to stay on task.
“In the past, we wouldn’t have been able to do that because there was a wall here,” says Chris Smith, principal at Parkside Elementary School, the first Columbus school to receive CSO’s activity commons renovations.
Parkside was designed by Norman Fletcher of The Architects Collaborative (a firm founded with former Bauhaus progenitor Walter Gropius) and completed in 1962. Its distinctive barrel-vaulted ceilings give it a civic-scale presence, and the activity commons similarly offer more space for smaller and larger groups of students to assemble. Shared by grade level, they can also host 100 kids at once for special events. As flexible spaces, the program of the activity commons is dependent more on furnishings than architecture. “Everything’s on wheels,” says Smith, and lower grades might see play structures in their commons, while older students have café-style seating and sectional couches.
At Weese’s 1957 Lillian C. Schmitt Elementary, classrooms are designed as modestly scaled pitched-roof houses marching along the prairie, all linked together around a hexagonal central library space with a skylight and thick red cedar beams. Made of warm Douglas fir and Chicago common brick, the school ably executes its designer’s intention of offering what he called “a sense of well-being and an at-home feeling.” The high pitch of the glass front glass wall creates a clerestory affect, flooding each classroom with natural light. A 1991 renovation by Leers Weinzapfel added colder, less tactile materials like concrete block and steel beams.
This was the first school where Cummins money backed quality public design: Its organization as a series of pavilions is seen in many Columbus schools, and as an inviolable element of its design. “When we first started, it was very important for us to keep as many Harry Weese rooms as close to what he [designed] as possible,” says Schmitt Elementary’s principal, Kaity Day. These house-shaped volumes are occasionally split up, or converted into activity commons, where their abundant natural light makes them joyful public forums.
This sense of domestic comfort and refinement is something Day feels her students need and deserve. Schmitt Elementary is a Title 1 school, and about 75% of its students are economically disadvantaged. “Not all of our families come from homes that are beautiful or well-maintained, so I wanted our kids to have a space that they could be proud of,” she says.
The form and pattern of the Columbus schools makes CSO’s job of integrating flexible collaboration space a bit easier. Their pavilion arrangement means that designers can swap one volume’s program for another with relatively little effort, and their horizontal orientation allows multiple classrooms to share a commons.
That’s not true for the entire district, though. In the 1970s, Columbus built several open-plan schools, like Mt. Healthy Elementary, where walls between classrooms were temporary or non-existent. These schools were responding to a then-trendy rejection of traditional teacher-directed learning, but they often suffer from a migraine-inducing lack of acoustic isolation.
At Mt. Healthy, designed by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates, students gathered in multi-level “clusters” for instruction, each one open and serving multiple grades. CSO’s plans for the school aren’t yet complete, so it’s not clear how they plan to execute the mandate to insert more spaces for collaborative learning — the whole building was already designed for this mode of education. Some form of enclosure is likely, as district officials have lost patience with the open-plan: “We are trying to be as respectful as we can as we develop options,” says Funk.
New School
Höweler + Yoon’s new Maple Grove Elementary is meant to synthesize the formal history of Columbus schools alongside contemporary pedagogical and security goals. The $60 million school, set to begin construction before the end of 2025, is being designed and built from the ground up around the activity commons concept. While its form and materials are unique, it exhibits the same decentralized, horizontal arrangement as older schools. It’s also the first school Höweler has designed. “The design excellence program doesn’t ask if you’ve ever designed a school before,” he says. “It really filters for design strength.”
Organized as a series of “petals” around a central hub, it functions as a telescopic viewfinder looking onto its wooded, exurban landscape. “The site is quite lovely, and our proposal was just to frame it,” Höweler says. Internal glass walls allow students and teachers to see out into the landscape from common areas thru classrooms via windows stretching from the first to the second floor.
The driving concept is “nested belonging” — hierarchies of space that are meant to encourage collaboration and independence in increasing group sizes. Two classrooms share a small group room and secluded cubby area; this is called a mini-cluster. Two mini-clusters share an activity commons that service a single grade, and two of these make up an entire “petal” or wing. Wings are color-coded to add a sense of visual identity, and each ground-level grade cluster has a door to the outside. The petals orbit a central “town square” (actually a triangle) that contains the reception area and library.
In an age of school shooters and lockdown drills, security was a primary concern. Each classroom has two exits; each wing can be locked down and isolated. The school will be made of precast concrete, with vertical striations, meant to look like quarried Indiana limestone.
The winner of a design competition, Höweler + Yoon earned this commission by designing the school from the inside out; using a child’s perspective to compile layers of outward community and focused intimacy. As a result, it resists an iconic postcard view and is content to settle into the landscape as a viewing platform.
‘Breaking the Classroom’
At this year’s Exhibit Columbus event, one installation used the city’s schools as means of exploring a different kind of educational innovation.
César Lopez, an architecture professor at the University of Virginia, and his fellow architecture educators Jess Myers, Amelyn Ng, and Germán Pallares-Avitia designed PUBLIC/SCHOOL/GROUNDS, which draws on the unique roofscapes of Columbus schools — Schmitt, Parkside and others — to create a series of wood outdoor classroom furniture. Arranged on the campus of Columbus’ Central Middle School, the site is simultaneously a space for learning, play, repose and exploration; reclining angles and swooping curves in bright primary colors.
“When we surveyed all of the schools, we saw these dynamic roofscapes, we saw this powerful materiality and incredible spaces,” says Lopez. “When we went inside the classrooms, we realized, why couldn’t some of the imagination of some of these rooflines come into this space? The same formal and material exploration didn’t really make it into the classroom.”
There’s an audio element, too. From embedded speakers, the sound of hallway foot traffic, doors and lockers slamming shut, and passing conversation reverberates through the installation, condensing the activity of school life. The soundscape blurs the process of “disciplining [students] through sonic triggers,” says Myers, diffusing the bells and whistles that prod students into obedience into a womb-like hum.
Unlike traditional classrooms, this installation is defiantly non-hierarchical and not teacher-led. With tactile, carpeted surfaces and pegboards with dowels connected by strings, it offers plenty of things for restless kids to do with their hands. Occupying three senses, it questions assumptions of focused attention, and is inclusive of neurodivergence. A test-run with students found kids using it for a “parkour vibe,” says Myers.
In many historical school contexts, she says, behavior and discipline have determined a school’s program more than the curriculum. With its porous borders and rejection of punitive order, PUBLIC/SCHOOL/GROUNDS presents an alternative model. “Authority and education should be divorced from each other,” says Lopez, who describes the team’s project as their attempt at “breaking the classroom.”
This attitude is not coming from a place of disregard for educational institutions. For Lopez, some much more powerful forces are already at work trying to “break the classroom,” via a Trump administration that has pledged to close the US Department of Education and leveled broadsides against higher education institutions. PUBLIC/SCHOOL/GROUNDS is not meant as a new typology, and is resistant to the modernist urge for sequential replication and rational expansion. It’s instead a “tactical intervention,” says Lopez, meant for time when institutional solutions are under fire.
That is decidedly not the context that generated Columbus’ singular crop of public schools. For Mings, the Chicago architect and Columbus native, the architecture he experienced at school was a signal that this place took civic space and community seriously. “If you look at all of the schools,” he says, “there’s this unsaid civic component to absolutely all of them so they that could host the community as well as the school.”