The Miller House: Mid-Century Modernism at Its Peak
Indiana
A short distance from the North Christian Church, on a quiet residential street in Columbus, Indiana, stands the house that many architectural historians consider the single finest example of mid-century modernist residential design in the United States.
Eero Saarinen began designing the Miller House in nineteen fifty-three for J. Irwin Miller and his wife Xenia. The project took four years. Saarinen brought in two of the most accomplished designers of the era to complete his vision: Alexander Girard, a New York-born designer of extraordinary skill, handled the interiors, and the landscape architect Dan Kiley designed the grounds. The three men worked in close collaboration, treating the house, its contents, and its gardens as a single integrated work of art.
What resulted was a six-thousand-eight-hundred-square-foot glass and steel pavilion set on a flat, manicured site. The floor plan is open and flowing, organized around a sunken conversation pit in the living room that became one of the most imitated domestic interior features of the nineteen sixties and seventies. Girard filled the rooms with bold color and pattern, using his own textile designs alongside works by major artists collected by the Millers over decades. Kiley's landscape extended the geometry of the house outward into formal allees and hedgerows.
The Millers lived in the house for over half a century. In two thousand nine their family donated the property, along with most of its original furnishings, to what is now the Indianapolis Museum of Art. After a two-million-dollar restoration the house opened to the public in May of two thousand eleven.
The building was declared a National Historic Landmark in two thousand, recognition that Columbus, Indiana had produced not just one but a cluster of buildings that stand among the most important works of American architecture. That cluster exists because one man, J. Irwin Miller, spent decades turning a Midwestern engine manufacturer's wealth into an experiment in civic beauty.
