Building Biospheres, Belgium Pavilion. — As part of Exhibit Columbus, Ellipsis is a space to consider the omitted legacies of Black and Indigenous placemaking in Columbus, Indiana. Project by AD-WO. All photography courtesy of Hadley Fruits for Landmark Columbus Foundation.

September 8, 2025

Exhibit Columbus 2025: Exploring Site, History, and Community

The fifth edition of the festival pays tribute to the city’s rich Modernist heritage while also re-examining the importance of shared public spaces.

By: Adrian Madlener

Architecture biennials are a dime a dozen these days, but most take place in major urban centers. Exhibit Columbus is the exception. While the midsized Indiana city is much smaller than Chicago, St. Louis, Sharjah, and Venice, it punches well above its weight. There is as much layered socio-cultural and historical complexity here as in these major metropolises, especially as a paradigm of the many American towns at this scale.

What sets Columbus apart, however, is its position as a midcentury modern case study. Like so many company towns, a dominant corporate force—in this case, the Cummins Engine Company—was responsible for its infrastructural growth. Here, this resulted in the construction of numerous private, civic, and religious buildings designed by 20th-century heavyweights Eero Saarinen, Robert Venturi, Kevin Roche, Charles Gwathmey, and later, Deborah Berke. Columbus was a test bed for the visionary strategies they later enacted across the country and the world.

“We were thinking about the histories that have been omitted in the conversation around Columbus. Most of it has been focused on modern architecture, while Indigenous space-making and Black inhabitation barely register in the normative discussions around the history of the place.” Emanuel Admassu, cofounder, AD-WO

Accessing Nostalgia creates a new temporary structure within and around the 136-year-old Crump Theatre that allows “a creative nostalgia to be projected; a nostalgia not for historic reenactment, nor for historic revision, but one that searches for a past perfect that can point to an idealized future.” Project by Adaptive Operations

A Midcentury Modern Laboratory

The Landmark Columbus Foundation (LCF) mounts the biennial Exhibit Columbus program as a more interpretive form of preservation, supplementing the city’s already well-established heritage with a fresh perspective. Like Cummins’s most consequential CEO, J. Irwin Miller—the visionary and financial force behind much of Columbus’s illustrious architectural development—the event provides today’s crop of critically minded practitioners with the chance to leave a mark, if only temporarily.

Some have joined the slew of historic buildings as permanent features. For the 2022–2023 cycle of Exhibit Columbus, New York firm PAU conceived InterOculus, a canopied dome that continues to cover the intersection of Washington and Fourth Streets. Though some of the installations in this year’s edition appear viable additions to the town’s “semi-urban fabric,” it remains to be seen whether any will stay in place.

View of the World from Indiana is an installation that highlights how the American Midwest has long served as an integral, yet under-recognized, foundation for the coastal architecture discipline. The designers argue that, with the highest concentration of architecture fellowships in the United States, the Midwest region’s spaces of architecture culture “are unquestionably spaces of emergence.” Project by Sarah Aziz

Yes And: A Curatorial Framework

For the 2024–2025 cycle, a curatorial consortium of practicing architects, preservationists, and cultural critics chose the theme Yes, And—a notion borrowed from improvisational theater—as a more open-ended through line. They chose sites throughout town to mount 13 newly commissioned installations, each responding to specific public, semi-public, and private outdoor spaces as added layers of instigation and proposal. Also at play were considerations of site, history, community, and where these fundamental conditions intersect.

While recipients of the J. Irwin and Xenia Miller prize were selected by the curators based on a shortlist, participants in the University Design Research Fellows program were chosen based on an open call. With funds raised from individual donors, corporate sponsors, and government agencies, LCF covers the cost of development and construction.

All were unveiled during an opening weekend celebration (August 15 to 16) and will remain on view for three and a half months. Various performative activations—a DJ set atop a car park and even a “drone drop”—also took place, drawing in an audience of more than 300 visitors.

“Many of the projects disrupt the environment that you locals frequent every day,” Exhibit Columbus curatorial partner, writer, and educator Rasul Mowatt said during a panel discussion. “They look back to the histories that are already known but overlooked, and also those that have never been uncovered before.”

The designers aimed to juxtapose traces of the recent fire that destroyed the Irwin Block Building with an evocation of cultural burnings enacted by the region’s Indigenous inhabitants. Ellipsis “conceptualizes fire as an agent of loss and renewal, able to revive abundant ecosystems and ancestral rituals.” Project by AD-WO.

The elliptical space was made with plants, black gravel, and fire-treated timber, designed to diverge “from the centripetal pull of a single, dominant center.” Project by AD-WO.

Memory, Ritual, and Engagement

Erected on the site of the historic Irwin Block, which burned down in 2022, AD–WO’s Ellipsis installation is a proposed gathering space constructed, in part, using its remnants. For the Brooklyn-based firm—principals Jen Wood and Emanuel Admassu—the agora of sorts is much more than an abstract reconstitution or monument to the original building. As tragic as it was, the fire opened up the opportunity for a more comprehensive reassessment of the locale’s past.

“We were thinking about the histories that have been omitted from the conversation around Columbus,” Admassu said. “Most of it has been focused on modern architecture, while Indigenous space-making and Black inhabitation barely register in the normative discussions around the history of the place.”

This investigation led them to indigenous practices of burning as a dualistic form of renewal and resilience. While new plantings embedding the structure within its surroundings imply the former, the fire-treating of its structural elements implies the latter.

“In our curatorial meetings, we thought a lot about the role Columbus played in shooting off the careers of the many architects that would gain recognition outside of the field,” said curatorial lead, Mila Lipinski, a Columbus-born, Jackson, Mississippi–based architect “This program provides a similar opportunity, a chance for the participants to build on the existing infrastructure and suggest new solutions—their Yes, And.”

Pool/Side introduces a shallow pool and elevated seating platform as both infrastructure and socio-cultural artifact at the Cleo Rogers Memorial Library Plaza. According to designers, the piece appropriates exclusionary elements of modernist architecture and it reimagines the sunken pool through the lens of inclusivity and joy. Project by Akima Brackeen

A Public Pool Monolith

A succinct example of this is University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign professor Akima Brackeen’s Pool/Side installation. Inserted within the plaza leading up to the I.M. Pei–designed Cleo Rogers Memorial Library, the shallow water basin emerges as a striking yet inviting blue monolith. Juxtaposing the modernist trope of reflecting pools—largely nonfunctional and purely aesthetic architectural elements found in some of Columbus’s most iconic sites—with the issue of water access in urban centers, the fully functional “aquatic conversation pit” inspires a new degree of engagement and gathering.

“In helping to develop the various commissions, we looked at sites that both address the idiosyncrasies of Columbus but that are also emblematic of site conditions found across the country,” said curatorial partner Joseph Altshuler, co-principal of Chicago practice Could Be Design. “The car park is a common, frankly underutilized, piece of American infrastructure that needs to be re-examined seriously.”

Joy Riding is a multimedia experience that highlights the joyous nature of Black car culture and its intersection with the iconic aesthetics of mid-century modern architecture in Columbus. The project transforms the Jackson Street Parking Garage into a destination for music, entertainment, and civic joy. Project by Studio Barnes

Over its duration, Joy Riding aims to remind visitors of the fun they had riding in the car with friends, listening to their favorite album, and finding joy in the simple pleasures of sitting in the parking lot. Project by Studio Barnes

Joy Riding Design

Answering that call is Miami-based practice Studio Barnes’s Joy Riding project. “Once we knew that we had the parking garage as the location of our intervention, we started thinking about the car, car culture, and specifically idling,” says principal Germane Barnes. “If a car is just sitting there parked, what do you do—sing, do homework, or just hang out?”

Consisting of a customized speaker system mounted to a mobile trailer, “the transformer” is enabled with Bluetooth connectivity. Anyone can go up to the top level of Columbus’s Jackson Street Garage and play music, or host an impromptu dance party. According to LCF, the interactive installation “evokes the deep bass lines central to Black car culture and underscores how sound, ritual, and assembly have long served as catalysts for celebration.” After its stint in Columbus, Joy Ride could potentially travel, amplifying various types of public events—concerts, outdoor movies, etc.

All three cited installations reveal the importance of shared public space but also the need for layered interventions to accommodate different levels of engagement: facilitating the reassessment of history, expanding the prescribed function of a site, and maybe even helping its users find consensus

Lift is grounded in the architectural legacy of Saarinen’s First Christian Church, opening the sunken courtyard to new ways of connecting. It challenges perceptions of the church as old-fashioned, formal, or impersonal, and instead invites everyone to experience the love and welcome of a diverse faith community. Project by Studio Cooke John

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