Concordia Theological Seminary: Saarinen's Village of Theology
Near Fort Wayne, Indiana
The campus visible from the road north of Fort Wayne is one of the more quietly remarkable pieces of modernist architecture in Indiana, a collection of buildings designed by Eero Saarinen, the Finnish-American architect who also designed the Gateway Arch in Saint Louis, the TWA terminal at Kennedy Airport, and Dulles International Airport outside Washington. Here in Fort Wayne, working in the nineteen fifties, Saarinen took a commission that asked him not for a monument but for a village, and he obliged.
The institution itself has a convoluted history that tracks the development of German Lutheranism in America. Its roots are in eighteen forty-four, when a Fort Wayne pastor named Friedrich Wyneken began training missionaries in his home. In eighteen forty-six it became a formal seminary under Wilhelm Sihler, and when German Lutherans organized the Missouri Synod in eighteen forty-seven, the Fort Wayne school was absorbed into that new denomination. The seminary then spent over a century moving, to Saint Louis, then to Springfield, Illinois, before returning to Fort Wayne in nineteen seventy-six to occupy the campus Saarinen had designed for a different Lutheran institution, Concordia Senior College, which had operated here from nineteen fifty-seven until it closed.
Saarinen modeled the campus after northern German villages, with clusters of white-washed buildings featuring diamond-shaped brick walls and pitched black tile roofs, all the rooflines running in the same direction. The result is deliberately intimate, not the grand collegiate Gothic of a major research university, but a human-scaled community space designed to encourage the theological formation that a seminary requires. Kramer Chapel anchors the center of the village.
The seminary trains pastors and deaconesses for the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, one of the largest and most theologically conservative Lutheran denominations in North America. The Saarinen campus gives this centuries-old theological mission one of its most distinctive physical homes in American religious education.
