Photo by Hadley Fruits Speaker and writer Glenda Winders is shown during her presentation Tuesday at Landmark Columbus’ Progressive Preservation series at the Columbus Area Visitors Center.
Amid the celebrated wonder of Columbus’ Modernist prizes of design, it’s partly a wonder that the former Mabel McDowell Elementary School ever was completed.
Speaker, researcher and writer Glenda Winders of Columbus mused and built slightly on that very idea Tuesday during a breezy, celebrity-infused installment of Landmark Columbus Foundation’s free Progressive Preservation: Schools Edition at the Columbus Area Visitors Center downtown. Her presentation before an audience of 50 people, including former McDowell teachers, was part of the foundation’s series on the roots of all the Bartholomew Consolidated School Corporation schools.
Architect John Carl Warnecke’s current McDowell Adult Education Center campus at 2700 McKinley Ave., on the National Register of Historic Places, is also significant partly because it was only the second school built with the guidance of the Cummins Foundation’s architecture program that has long attracted top, rising designers.
“I have learned that you cannot make up things that can go wrong with a building (project),” Winders said to her listeners’ gallows-induced laughter.
An example or two: Original bids on the project came in 50 percent higher than expected.
Then the steel industry went on strike just after Warnecke re-drew a less-expensive design with steel beams.
This was followed by the project’s lowest bidder suing the school corporation when it was not selected for the work.
Then came a snafu with the roof materials.
However, the building — actually a collection of structures connected by outdoor walkways and courtyards — eventually opened in 1960 to the praise of local teachers. Warnecke, who would later become globally known for his design of President John F. Kennedy’s eternal-flame gravesite, originally had little interest in the local project — at least not until well-known architect Eero Saarinen, a longtime friend of former Cummins Engine Co, executive J. Irwin Miller, convinced Warnecke that he should reach out for the work.
In fact, Saarinen convinced Warnecke that the school structure in Columbus represented “the chance of a lifetime,” as Winders put it.
Yet, it was taking a chance of another project in Washington, D.C., that put Warnecke on more of a national map. And that unfolded when Jacqueline Kennedy wanted someone to intervene to save a collection of significant 19th Century Victorian homes in Washington’s Lafayette Square area amid a cry from developers for new office buildings (and their desire to raze the homes).
“He (Warnecke) came up with an idea to build two new office buildings, sort of with a different footprint, that would be a backdrop — a really nice backdrop — to these Victorian homes,” Winders said.
A few years afterward, after President Kennedy’s assassination, the architect and Jacqueline Kennedy fell in love and enjoyed a three-year relationship.
The other celebrity twist to Winders’ presentation surfaced with the mention of a 1967 visit to McDowell from First Lady Bird Johnson amid a national American beautification tour. An elaborate dinner including such distinguished guests as designers I.M. Pei and Alexander Girard unfolded for a crowd of 500 people.
Warnecke died in 2010 at the age of 91. In a touching video clip at the close of Winders talk, Warnecke’s daughter, Margo Warnecke Merck, said her father would be thrilled to know that Columbus residents were so fondly remembering his work on the school named for a longtime local teacher.
Winders kicked off the school series with a recounting of the history of Lillian Schmitt Elementary School as part of a Progressive Preservation talk in July at Helen Haddad Hall.
Richard McCoy, executive director of the Landmark Columbus Foundation, explained the impetus of the series, which will focus next on Northside Middle School.
“We don’t think,” he said “that this (school design) heritage is well enough known.”
