Christian, where my dad used to play.”
Cross-check: yes.
“What’s happened to it?”
“They tore down the pulpit, which was this beautiful off-center wooden throne, because apparently it’s not hip for a preacher to stand still anymore, they’re supposed to walk around like Jesus’s salesmen. They installed a huge pull-down screen for movies and a stereo system for Christian rock. I guess nobody has the attention span to sit through a sermon that isn’t a multimedia experience anymore. What they don’t get is that this building is incompatible, it’s just not suited to become a megachurch.”
“It’s the one by Eero Saarinen, right?” Supplementary information, thank you, Google. Columbus, Anja knew, was a hotbed of modern architecture. A shining beacon of culture in the Midwest, its landscape was dotted with big names. Louis had returned to this topic many times before, rewriting its significance each time.
“No, Eliel, his dad. It was the first big architecture ever built in Columbus.”
“Aren’t there historical preservation laws?”
He sat on the side of the bed and pulled on his socks, which he usually slept wearing. “There’s a high-low twang to Columbus that’s really hard to explain. Architectural masterpieces are interspersed with strip malls and run-down garages and trailer parks. People don’t even notice the public library is an I. M. Pei, teenagers just know there are dark corners to make out in. Then there’s this huge ring of industrial buildings all around town, since the engine company paid for the fancy architecture but they never updated their own factories. So most people actually live and work in those shitty buildings, even though the town still looks nice to tourists.”
“The engine company paid for the architecture?” Scanning. No hit.
“It was a corporate philanthropy thing. One of the first corporate philanthropy things ever.”
She knew where this was going. This was going very far away from Pat, from emotional to intellectual content. And he’d accused Laura of masking her engagement with a pretense of academic interest. It took one to know one.
She went along, following the script. “What did the engine company get out of paying for the architecture?”
“That’s the thing about corporate philanthropy, it’s not obvious what you get out of it. You do it for a lot of reasons, like public image and employee morale. But also in a bigger sense, it’s one way big business convinces people that you don’t need the government to support public services. If corporations are benevolent and investing in plant-a-tree day and nice buildings then people won’t pressure government to do its job and interfere. Philanthropy is the cornerstone of neoliberalism, as they say.”
He walked back into the bathroom and came out again with his toothbrush in hand. “Wait, how long has The Bachelor even been running? I thought it came out twenty years ago.”
“Longer than that. It’s the longest-running reality show ever. Aside from maybe Big Brother.”
“Hard to believe,” Louis said, back in the bathroom, brushing his teeth.
She called out: “How does an engine company get into modern architecture, though? Seems like a bit of a niche interest.”
“There was a mastermind at work,” he garbled back. She listened for the spit, the drain.
“A mastermind, you say.” He emerged from the bathroom and perched on the side of the bed.
“Yes, a mastermind!” He pulled back to look at her. “J. Irwin Miller, the proto-ethical CEO of the future.”
She laughed. “Would you care to tell me the whole story?”
“A bedtime story. Let me think for a second.” He mimicked stroking his chin, obviously not needing to think about anything. He was born prepared. “Let’s begin in the 1940s.” She laughed again.
“It’s the middle of World War Two.”
“Okay.”
“J. Irwin Miller, a native of Columbus, takes over the Cummins Engine Company when his uncle dies.”
“Okay. Then what?”
“The company isn’t doing so well. But even though he doesn’t know anything about running a company, he turns it around really fast. He’s naturally a great manager and everyone loves him. He’s a humanitarian and a Christian and he’s developed this fetish for the working class while he was away in the Navy working alongside the masses. He’s all for workers’ rights. He actually helps his own workers unionize.”
“What’s the catch?”
“No catch.” Louis smiled, half-serious, as always. “He’s a good Christian. So eventually the company has grown so much that the size of the whole town has doubled. None of the schools or public buildings are big enough anymore, and the government is building all these shitty buildings really fast to try to fit people. So our hero, J. Irwin, decides to use company profits to pay for real architects to come design them instead.”
“He pays for the whole thing?”
“He pays the extra on top of the government budget that it costs to get a good architect instead of a prefab thing.”
“So he builds your church first.”
“The church is his own special project. It’s kind of a test run to convince the town that modernism is okay. The backwater Midwesterners don’t ‘get’ modernism until he shoves it down their throats via religion. He convinces the congregation to do it by making them feel involved in the design process. He asks them what they actually want in a church.”
“Participatory bottom-up spatial praxis!”
“Exactly.” Louis laughed. “So ahead of his time.”
“How do you know so much about this?”
“I wrote a paper in college.”
“What was the paper?
He cleared his throat and mimed pushing glasses up his nose.
“Well, I argued that Irwin invented the creative city concept, by building architecture to suck smart young people to the middle of nowhere to work for his engine company. He built up the town’s cultural capital and he got to hang out with famous architects. And all the while he created this elaborate tax dodge. He invented corporate philanthropy as an advertising scheme and a way of getting out of taxes. He made public, private, and personal interests align. The perfect trifecta.”
“What’s Cummins doing today?”
“Nothing really. Diesel’s not a thing anymore. And after Irwin died they stopped innovating. No money left to build new architecture or keep my church in shape.”
My church. An odd indication of ownership. Ownership arising through lack.
“Maybe they need a new Irwin,” she said.
“The
