Irwin Conference Center
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Irwin Union Bank and Trust
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| Location | 500 Washington Street Columbus, Indiana |
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| Coordinates | 39°12′13″N 85°55′17″W / 39.20361°N 85.92139°WCoordinates: 39°12′13″N 85°55′17″W / 39.20361°N 85.92139°W |
| Architect | Eero Saarinen, Kevin Roche, John Dinkeloo, Dan Kiley |
| Architectural style | International Modern, Bauhaus |
| MPS | Modernism in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Design, and Art in Bartholomew County, 1942-1965 MPS |
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| Significant dates | |
| Added to NRHP | May 16, 2000 |
| Designated NHL | May 16, 2000 |
The Irwin Conference Center (formerly known as Irwin Union Bank) was designed by Eero Saarinen and built in 1954 in Columbus, Indiana. It is currently owned and operated by Cummins, whose world headquarters is located across Jackson Street in the Cummins Corporate Office Building. In recogniztion of its unique and beautiful design, the resource was designated a National Historic Landmark by the National Park Service in 2001.
The building consists of a one-story bank structure and adjacent three-story office annex. A portion of the office annex was built along with the banking hall in 1954. The remaining, much larger portion, designed by Kevin Roche, John Dinkeloo and Associates, was built in 1973.
Irwin Miller became president of the Irwin Union Trust Company after his father's death in 1947. Three years later, he commissioned Eero Saarinen to design a new building for the bank. The building was designed to distance the Irwin Union Bank from traditional banking architecture, which mostly echoed imposing, neoclassical style buildings of brick or stone. Miller wanted the building to symbolize the bank's progressive mission, which included offering some of the first credit cards and earliest drive-through banking. Instead of having tellers behind iron bars and removed from their customers, Saarinen worked to develop a building that would welcome customers rather than intimidate them.
I fly from Dallas to Columbus, Indiana where before the war we built a church. Perhaps you remember it. The same family, only a younger generation, wants to build a bank. We now have what I think is a very good scheme. I don't think it would be just the way it is unless you and I had been to Cordoba and seen the mosque. It is a wonderful opportunity to do something really good and different because the client is simply out of this world. It is going to be a bank without any pompousness, absolutely no intention to impress. All it is a very low glass enclosed marketplace-like little building in the middle of the town.
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