In the heyday of American industrialism, companies often shaped whole communities, serving as a town’s primary employer and economic driver. One of these so-called company towns, Columbus, Indiana, is home to Cummins Engine Company, a humble population of 46,000, and a disproportionate number of iconic mid-century modern buildings.

Located 50 miles south of Indianapolis, Columbus owns dozens of architectural masterworks by internationally renowned designers from the era. Eliel and Eero Saarinen, and more than a handful of Pritzker Prize Laureates, including I.M. Pei, Richard Meier, and Robert Venturi, began developing projects there with sudden regularity in the mid-1950s. Several of their building works are located along the city’s Fifth Street, otherwise known as the Avenue of the Architects.

An unlikely mecca of modernist architecture, it’s a place where banks, churches, office buildings, and schools (in short, the core of the city’s civic life) are also frequent stops along an architectural tour route trodden by thousands of design scholars and enthusiasts each year. The influential Indianapolis-based magazine Saturday Evening Post, noting the city’s curious character combination of small-town charm and design sophisticate, famously dubbed it “the Athens of the prairie” in 1964, an apt tagline that has held over the years.

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