History 301: A minority opinion – I ♥ the Federal Building

By Connie Zeigler

The Minton-Capehart Federal Building is probably one of the least-loved public buildings in Indianapolis. I happen to

The Minton-Capehart Federal Building sits across Pennsylvania Street from the American Legion Mall.

like it. I find the concrete building aesthetically appealing. But I appreciate it even more for its representation of a certain architectural type and period. And for the piece of public art that adorns it.

It may be true that, even given the long view of history, neither the building nor the art piece is or will seem singularly important. But they indicate, at a glance, a specific period in design history (the 1970s) just as effectively as the Indiana Statehouse and its skylight dome represent the design of its period (the 1880s).

Love it or hate it, the Minton-Capehart building is a concrete statement of 1970s design and a movement toward modernism that the federal government was encouraging in the post World War II period.

According to the publication, “Growth, Efficiency and Modernism: GSA Buildings of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s,” the Government Services Administration, which has overseen construction and maintenance of federal buildings since 1949, changed its approach to design in the 1960s. Federal buildings would no longer display grand nationalistic styles (like, for instance, the Beaux Arts classicism of the U.S. Court House on Ohio Street in Indianapolis) but rather should look very much like the office buildings of big business – the big business of bureaucracy.

Following the lean years of the Great Depression and the rationing of World War II, the GSA faced a huge backlog of need by war’s end. It began a massive building campaign in the 1950s that lasted through the 1970s and brought about the construction of more than 700 federal buildings.

Early in this period the designs of the ultra-modern Eero Saarinen Dulles Airport in Washington, D. C., and the streamlined Skidmore, Owings and Merrill buildings at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., fueled a wave of federal modernism.

In 1962, President John F. Kennedy’s Ad Hoc Committee on Federal Space declared that federal buildings should reflect “the finest contemporary American architectural thought.” Following that declaration, new government buildings became synonymous with modern architecture in the U.S.

In the 1970s, the GSA chose the very modern design of Indianapolis’s Woollen Associates, Inc., an architectural firm headed by Evans Woollen, for the new Federal Office Building (later named the Minton-Capehart Federal Building for Indiana Senators Sherman Minton and Homer Capehart) in Indianapolis.

By that time Woollen Associates had already made a reputation with the beautifully modern Clowes Hall and the Indiana University Musical Arts Center. Evans Woollen’s firm would go on to become arguably the most prominent architecture firm in the city and has designed buildings all across the state and the nation. (A current-day incarnation of this firm, Woollen, Molzan, and Partners, is still operating in Indianapolis and gives a brief history of the company on its website. One of the firm’s most notable recent projects was the Central library expansion.)

For the Federal Office Building, the firm’s design was an inverted ziggurat-shaped building, with each floor cantilevered slightly over the one below it. The building rests upon a central one-story box and is supported along the outside edges by concrete pillars.

The concrete building was a stripped-down modern style known as “Brutalism,” a term that came from the French “be´´ton brut,” meaning “raw concrete.” Brutalism was also a play on words however, like a visual onomatopoeia for the rough, hulking style it defined.

Woollen Associates produced an unapologetic, hard-edged Brutalist building.

In 1974, the same year that graphic artist Milton Glaser started his own company in New York, the GSA commissioned Glaser to design a site-specific piece of art for the under-construction Federal Office Building. Milton Glaser, whose Milton Glaser, Inc. is still in business, was already well-known as a graphic artist and as the founder and design director of New York Magazine. He would go on to become a graphic arts superstar when his “I ♥ New York” design hit the streets in 1976.

The thoughtful Glaser undoubtedly carefully studied the Minton-Capehart building. A New York City resident, Glaser would have known Brutalism as a new design style that had been popular for only a decade or so.

The artwork that Glaser came up with for the stark federal building was a soft-toned, subtly shifting rainbow of color stretching more than 600 feet as it wrapped around the first story of the building. Shading from salmon to federal blue, the piece was painted directly and ironically onto the raw concrete, softening it.

Like the Brutalist style of the building (a style that would drop out of favor before the end of 1970s), Glaser’s art was a signature piece of its time. A very 1970s piece of graphic art on a very ’70s building. Both represent quite distinctly that concise era of design.

And that’s why I ♥ the Minton-Capehart Federal Building. It’s a time capsule. It’s a building that couldn’t happen now. Maybe that’s good, but I’m glad it’s here to show us what was happening in architecture and design in a particular era, 35 years ago.

Connie Zeigler is president and owner of C. Resources, Inc. Connie is a writer and a historic preservationist who consults on preservation and greening of historic buildings. She lives in Fountain Square and blogs at INArchitecture on cresourcesinc.blogspot.com.