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Destination Springfield
By John Zukowsky
Director, Westcott House Foundation

Authors such as Edward McMahon have written convincingly about how historic architectural environments can add to the economic welfare of a community, but the same can also be said for examples of good-quality contemporary architecture. Witness the recent success that cities such as Milwaukee and Chicago have had with hiring superstar architects to design their art museum and open-air concert bandstand, respectively, in order to boost cultural tourism in those cities. Indeed, citizens in smaller midwestern cities from Davenport, Iowa to Grand Rapids, Michigan and Akron, Ohio have all jumped on the bandwagon and hired well-known European architects to design new museums or make very contemporary additions to their existing art museums. A new construction such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cincinnati by Iraqi-born and London-based architect Zaha Hadid -- the first woman to win the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize -- has made headlines in the architectural and popular press alike in the past year. In many ways, all of this very recent activity is the result of the international media and tourism blockbuster of Frank Gehry’s expressionistic, titanium Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain when it opened 1999-2000 to record-breaking crowds. But most people do not realize that his famed museum was part of a much larger ongoing plan that the city of Bilbao and regional government of Biskaia have implemented, to hire renowned contemporary architects from across Europe, the United States and Japan, to design projects there. This is being done in a very conscious effort to change the image of Bilbao from a rust belt, former shipbuilding city to an international destination for architectural tourism.

What Bilbao started in the 1990s was part of a much longer continuum where European cities and their respective governments consciously invested in prominent and often coordinated, carefully planned new construction in order to create tourist destinations as well as solve various architectural and urban problems. Of all European countries it seems that Germany has been the most consistent supporter of this belief throughout the twentieth century, and there are numerous examples that can support this observation. Historically the most famous of these is the Weissenhof Siedlung in Stuttgart from 1927 which showcased what ideal modern housing could be in a series of model homes and apartments by architects from around Europe who soon became leading practitioners of the Modern Movement in the late 1920s and early 30s. But one of the prominent, fairly recent examples includes the dozens of new museums and exhibition halls created in the 1980s by the city of Frankfurt to establish that their city was both a leader in culture as well as in banking. Another includes the International Bau-Austellung (IBA) or International Building Exhibition of the mid 1980s in what was then West Berlin. This was the public-private partnership that developed subsidized housing in an effort to revitalize various older residential, commercial and even disused industrial areas, and promote the pluralistic, democratic values of Western democracy on the frontier of the Cold War. Perhaps the most notable example of the latter IBA developments was the 1985-88 re-planning of the industrial harbor at Tegel (Tegelerhafen) as a residential area with villa-like apartment buildings designed by prominent architects such as Americans John Hejduk, Charles Moore, Robert A.M. Stern, and Stanley Tigerman, as well as Frenchman Antoine Grumbach and Italian Paolo Portoghesi, along with a number of Berlin builders. This same type of international housing exhibition was also done previously in postwar West Berlin’s Interbau exhibition of 1957, which has precedents in 1920s examples throughout the city as well.

In contrast to those examples, many might correctly cite the importance of the Cummins Engine Foundation in their support of the work of prominent American architects for public buildings in Columbus, Indiana. Their efforts over the past four decades and more have made that small city a little capital of American architecture from the second half of the twentieth century, and undeniably an important architectural destination in the Midwest. But in those disparate examples that are seemingly scattered throughout that town, the architectural sites and their impact are also dissipated all over the townscape. What makes the German, and particularly, the IBA examples more powerful is that each of the various buildings is part of a greater whole, with those greater developments becoming an anchor for subsequent neighborhood growth along with being very strong ensembles of architecture in themselves – spatial experiences that are truly coordinated destinations related to the needs of contemporary society. Beyond Frank Lloyd Wright’s great Westcott House, Springfield already has striking examples of historic buildings around town, like the Heritage Center, the Post Office, and its old public library. It has some good newer buildings in the Kuss Auditorium, the main public library, and within the city hall plaza. And it has some great sequential building potential within, say, preservation of the grand old houses on Limestone and High Streets. But what it could use that even the architectural mecca of Columbus Indiana doesn’t have is a coordinated sequence of contemporary buildings – a sequence that might truly be an architectural destination in itself, as well as serve institutional needs within and without the community. Who knows, we at the Westcott House Foundation might be part of making this happen here. In early September 2004 we had the opportunity of having architect Stanley Tigerman visit our property and talk with us about what we might be able to do in helping our historic house come alive for architectural enthusiasts and the general public across the entire region. I am hopeful that his first visit will be the beginning of a regional dialogue that will eventually bring some of those more positive contemporary urban experiences from cities like Berlin into our own built environment, making Springfield an architectural destination for the twenty-first century.