Designtripper

I was feeling guilty about letting another summer slip by without taking the Architectural Marvel Summer Road Trip I’ve been planning for the last seven years. I live in the Midwest, so it’s pretty inexcusable that I haven’t been to Columbus, Indiana—a pinprick of a town that has more than 70 buildings by some of the world’s most revered modernist architects. Thanks to a foundation that offered to pay the architect’s fee for any public building that was designed by an architect selected from a specific list (that’s the short version of the story anyway), Columbus is now a functioning, small-town repository of buildings by super-star architects like Harry Weese, Richard Meier, Eliel Saarinen and I.M. Pei.

But I just found out that the Indianapolis Museum of Art acquired the Miller House, which was designed by Eero Saarinen in 1957 for Joseph Miller (the man who started the aforementioned foundation) with gardens by Dan Kiley. And yes, it’s an open-plan, flat-roofed, glass-walled ode to  the international modernist style of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, but I am far more giddy about the Alexander Girard interiors. Alexander Girard! Herman Miller textile genius! It will be open to the public sometime in 2012. Trip postponed another two years; I don’t mind waiting.

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