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Columbus, Indiana is a strange place. It's an industrial, company town, home to Cummins Diesel, that happens to have some of the best architecture in the US.

The philanthropist J. Irwin Miller offered to pay the architects' fees for the public buildings, not for their construction expenses. While this arrangement doesn't result in architecture on a monumental scale, it does result in clever solutions to architectural problems faced by many small, American towns.

The best buildings in Columbus are Aero Saarinen's North Christian Church and Robert Venturi's Fire Station Number 4. Saarinen's church is a sublime piece of serious, formal modern architecture. The drive across the lawn and through the pew-like parking lot is also something else.

Venturi's Fire Station, on the other hand, is exquisite postmodern silliness. The fire station's central tower is more of an anatomical joke than an uplifting expression of oneness. Instead of the church's bucolic, landscaped approach, the fire station is directly on a busy street, sandwiched between a condo and some kind of electrical tower. Venturi plays with the exterior, adding a disjointed medley of architectural features, including an offset ribbon window.

There are a number of other cool buildings, including the residence of J. Irwin Miller, an I.M. Pei library that has a theme of squares (he used triangles in the National Gallery of Art) and an Eliel Saarinen church. Downtown there's a great place to get wiener schnitzel... ask at the tourism office.

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