A rendering of Maple Grove Elementary, a $60 million public school that will be joining an existing collection of famed modernist civc architecture in Columbus, Indiana.
Credit: Höweler + Yoon
Yesterday’s Schools of Tomorrow Face the Future
In the 1950s and ’60s, top architects built a trove of daring modernist schools in Columbus, Indiana. Now these midcentury icons are getting a $300 million update.
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.