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Ill's small program in Columbus not seen as threat to Ball State, but it could give a big boost to Indiana's mid-century mecca
After half a century of having the in-state field to itself, Ball State University's College of Architecture and Planning has some competition.
Or perhaps just a new colleague. That's certainly the spin favored by the Muncie school, the Indiana Commission for Higher Education and the state's architectural community.
In 2018, Indiana University inaugurated the J. Irwin Miller Architecture Program, a three-year master of architecture degree. It's headquartered not in Bloomington but in the design mecca of Columbus-named by the American Institute of Architects as the country's sixth-most-architecturally important city. It's taking in about 20 students a year, with plans to ramp up to a full student body of 60 to 75.
It's Indiana's second master's-level architecture offering (after BSU) at a state-funded school.
The Columbus program is the culmination of lengthy talks between IU officials and Columbus city leaders, and more intensive (and recent) negotiations with state agencies. The first fruit of that effort was the establishment almost a decade ago of the Indiana University Center for Art + Design Columbus.
T Kelly Wilson, who oversees the master's program as director of the Center for Art + Design, sees the program as a step forward for the city-whose international reputation for architecture was honed by the late industrialist J. Irwin Miller.
While chairman of Cummins Inc. in the 1950s through the 1970s, Miller transformed a decaying Columbus into a showcase for buildings designed by architects like Eero Saarinen and I.M. Pei.
One of the big pluses of the new program is that the graduate students for the most part live in Columbus. The city's previous academic efforts catered mostly to students enrolled on IU's Bloomington campus who had to drive an hour each way to attend programs.
"Bringing undergraduates from Bloomington once a week or at...