In 1957, the Cummins Foundation agreed to pay the architects’ fees for any new municipal building — a private-public partnership that resulted in more than 60 buildings designed by prominent architects. All are innovative…but more importantly, they sparked a civic pride whereby homeowners feel obliged to keep up their quaint Victorians, and businesses aim for architectural greatness, even without the foundation’s largesse.
(New York Times 6/12/07)

I’ve mentioned Columbus before. So this is just a reminder that there are good ways to put the casino’s cash flow to use.

My impression is that the two new council members do have more worldly tastes than their predecessors, and the idea of becoming the Columbus of Illinois may not be so unrealistic. It’s my view that this is the most promising area where Elgin can position itself: art, architecture, culture.

People often say that Elgin has an image problem, and there’s no better solution to a city’s image problem than a highly visible, architecturally-stunning landmark. Remember the Bilbao Effect?

The story is, by now, familiar to almost everyone: A sleepy, seaside, former industrial city in Northern Spain gets a new museum housed in a building already called–on its completion at the end of the 20th century–the most important building of the 21st. The city, of course, is Bilbao; the museum is Frank O. Gehry’s Guggenheim. Virtually overnight, the small city became one of the most popular destinations in Europe. From all reports, Bilbao is rapidly metamorphosing from a sort of one-hit wonder to a genuinely vibrant city with restaurants, nightlife, theatre, and art. Gehry’s radical, shimmering metal building has become a source of immense civic pride. (The New Colonist)

It’s not even so much about what outsiders think, whether we’ll get a write-up in the New York Times and Architectural Record or whether tourists will come. It’s about the people of Elgin, and what they think about their own city.

But it’s also a financial investment with financial returns. Again, look at Bilbao:

With its dramatic architecture, the museum continues to be a major draw, attracting people who would otherwise not come. The Bilbao estimates that its economic impact on the local economy was worth €168 million (approximately $147 million) last year–up from €149 million ($130 million) in 2000–and it also brought in a further €27 million ($23 million) to the Basque treasury in taxes. This represents the equivalent of 4,415 jobs. A visitor survey revealed that 82% came to the city of Bilbao exclusively to see the museum or had extended their stay in the city to visit it. (Forbes 2/2002)

The casino provides $20-$30M a year ($25M this year), plenty to pay fees commanded by leading architects, whether it’s Gehry, Koolhaas, Coop Himmelblau or Zaha Hadid, and enough to undertake a major image-transforming project.

One of the reasons I turned against the $125M concert hall proposal was that I read that the city council was most impressed by the Bass Performance Hall in Forth Worth, which is of no architectural interest or worth whatsoever, I’m sorry to say. And is, in fact, an affront to the dignity of Forth Worth, which being the location of Louis Kahn’s great masterpiece, The Kimball Art Museum, resides on an exalted plane in world architecture. The Bass Performance Hall sullied Forth Worth in the same way the Harold Washington Library sullied Chicago. It is not a model to emulate. And $125M deployed in that way is $125M flushed down the toilet.

This isn’t a post about the concert hall, so I won’t go further into why I oppose it. I just want to affirm in closing that architecture is the most powerful way to transform the image of a place. And that the genius of J. Irwin Miller, the man behind Cummins and the architectural miracle of Columbus, Indiana, was in discovering a system that would turn every building into a great building. He didn’t build these buildings himself (aside from his house and company, of course). If he did, even with great wealth, he would have been able to build only a few. Instead, he chose to pay the architect’s fee, thereby ensuring that almost all new construction in his city would be designed by world-famous architects. He had a businessman’s keen sense of stretching a dollar. I hope that somebody in our community, if not the city itself, takes a close look at this model, and start to see what it can do for us.

Filed under: arts, citycouncil, downtown, music.
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