5 examples of mid-century architecture on the Indiana University Bloomington campus

Many of Indiana University's buildings are faced with limestone, giving the campus a unified aesthetic, and there are a number of the architectural styles represented.

Saturday, a walking tour organized by Indiana Landmarks visited buildings on the IU Bloomington campus that were built from the 1930s to the 2020s.

It was Indiana Landmarks’ 17th "Back to the Future" tour, this time presented by Indiana Modern, an affinity group of Indiana Landmarks that works to preserve the best examples of mid-century architecture, design and landscapes across the state.

Adam Thies, IU’s associate vice president for capital planning, said in a news release that IU has a diverse selection of architectural styles across its campus.

“The introduction of the design aesthetic of the mid-century is prevalent on the campus and sits in a family of styles that range from Romanesque to Brutalist and beyond,” Thies said.

The buildings visited on the tour included the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design, Woodburn Hall, Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art, the Lilly Library and Beck Chapel. These buildings are passed by and used every day, but few people know about their history.

Beck Chapel

Finished in 1957, the chapel was a gift from IU alumni Frank and Daisy Beck in 1941. It is made of Indiana limestone and wood from southern Indiana forests. Today, the chapel is used for weddings, memorial services, recitals and other events.

Woodburn Hall

Completed in 1940 to house IU’s School of Business, Woodburn Hall was one of a few campus buildings designed by A.M. Strauss. He was an architect from Fort Wayne who designed several landmark buildings in Indiana and Ohio throughout the early 20th century. The building was constructed with Indiana limestone with Art Deco and Collegiate Gothic-influenced design elements. 

Lilly Library 

The library was originally built in 1960 to house the private library donated by Josiah K. Lilly Jr. Today, it holds significant items including the New Testament of the Gutenberg Bible, Abraham Lincoln’s law office desk, William Shakespeare’s First Folio and John Audubon’s Birds of America. It reopened in 2021 following a top-to-bottom renovation that made the space more modern and better present its collections.

Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design

In the 1950s, the Alpha Theta chapter of IU’s fraternity Pi Lambda Phi hired Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to design a fraternity house that was never built and was forgotten about. In 2013, after Sidney Eskenazi, a fraternity member who attended IU in 1952, mentioned the plans’ existence to IU President Michael McRobbie, the school eventually located the project’s drawings and documentation in the archives of the Art Institute of Chicago and New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Construction was finished in 2021.

Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art

Opened in 1982, known originally as the Indiana University Art Museum, the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art was created by Chinese-American architect I.M. Pei. Pei got inspiration from the garden villas at Suzhou, China, and when the museum underwent a $30 million renovation in 2016, the reconfigured spaces to make the building a teaching facility still respected Pei’s original vision.

Mark Dollase, vice president of preservation services at Indiana Landmarks and organizer of the tour said he thinks each building has something different and interesting for people to see.

“This year’s tour provides the opportunity to explore some of the best modern architecture in the state in a collaboration with Indiana University,” Dollase said.