What a Building Does: The Hoosier Modernisms of Evans Woollen, by Phillip Cox and Niall Cronin | Indiana University Press |$40
Architecture in Indiana is often quiet and unnoticed. Many of the state’s most ambitious works become backdrops to the daily rhythms of our car-centered lives. For decades, that was how Evans Woollen’s architecture existed in the public consciousness. People worshipped in his churches, attended performances in his halls, dwelled in his houses, and carried books out of his library without knowing the name of the architect who shaped those experiences.
What a Building Does, a new publication from Phillip Cox and Niall Cronin, invites a renewed appreciation for Woollen’s extensive oeuvre and, in doing so, helps us better understand Indiana itself. The book serves as a rediscovery for those who grew up with Woollen’s buildings and provides an introduction for Indiana’s next generation, as well as national readers who are just now learning how much of the Midwest’s architectural character he helped define.
Evans Woollen was born in Indianapolis in 1927 and studied architecture at Yale, where he was shaped by the postwar culture of American modernism. He worked briefly on the East Coast with notable architects, including Philip Johnson. This early exposure to the intellectual centers of American design was essential. Woollen was never provincial. He was a Midwesterner who spoke fluently in the language of national and international design. He returned home not to retreat from broader conversations but to extend them, placing Indiana squarely within the evolving vocabulary of postwar modernism.
In 1955, Woollen founded his own Indianapolis-based firm, which grew to become Woollen, Molzan and Partners, and he operated it until 2011. The book covers ten of Woollen’s most significant Indiana works. Each chapter combines Cox’s accessible and clear writing with Cronin’s contemporary photography, which shows these buildings in the present day rather than as mid-century artifacts frozen in time. The archival material is particularly strong: early sketches, fundraising renderings, and construction photos reveal how Woollen thought through program, form, and budget.
Cox brings Woollen’s personality into focus through a series of interviews, including many from those who worked with and for him. In What a Building Does we see a designer serious about ideas and narrative, meticulous with detail, occasionally stern, but always working toward clarity and usefulness.
The Parke House (1955) and the Hughes House (1957) introduce him as a residential modernist. These houses, with their generous glass and airy plans, brought a touch of New Canaan to Indianapolis. They feel light and practical, quietly radical for their time and place, while deeply attuned to Midwestern habits of living. Clowes Memorial Hall (1963) at Butler University marks his leap into major public architecture. Designed with John Johansen, it is one of the most refined performance halls in the Midwest. The fact that Woollen and Johansen won the commission over Eero Saarinen speaks volumes about their emerging reputations at the time and signaled bright futures.
Barton Tower (1968) is perhaps his most debated work. A Brutalist housing project in the heart of Indianapolis, it embodies the tension between ambitious architectural thought and the complicated social policies that shaped urban renewal. It also reveals Woollen’s willingness to introduce new forms to a city unaccustomed to them. Where other architects softened their buildings to accommodate local tastes, Woollen held firm to an architectural conviction that modernism could elevate everyday life.
St. Thomas Aquinas Church (1969) shows a different side of his work. The sanctuary gathers worshippers in a communal geometry, light filters in quietly from concealed windows, and a red negative-space cross anchors the room without ornament. Cox and Cronin reveal how inventive and budget-conscious the project was, noting Woollen’s use of simple materials, exposed structural elements, and restrained detail to achieve spatial drama without expensive finishes. He had a gift for creating high-impact experiences without high-cost gestures.
His later works, including the Musical Arts Center (1972) at Indiana University, the New Harmony Inn (1975), and the Saint Meinrad Archabbey monastery (1982), show his range. He could design exuberant interiors, filled with color and sensory rhythm, and he could also produce buildings of deliberate restraint. The monastery building reveals an architect comfortable with silence and simplicity; its legible concrete structure, repetitive bays, restrained detailing, and controlled natural light align architecture with the rigors of monastic life.
In the heart of Indianapolis, Woollen’s Minton–Capehart Federal Building (1975), his transformative expansions of the Indianapolis Children’s Museum (1989), and the Central Library (2007), which was his last major commission, reflect a career-long commitment to civic architecture and the belief that modern design could give form and dignity to public life.
The book is a strong introduction not only to Woollen’s buildings, but also to Indiana’s broader architectural culture.
Indiana has a deeper, more varied design history than most people realize. It includes internationally renowned figures such as Eliel and Eero Saarinen, I. M. Pei, Minoru Yamasaki, Harry Weese, Deborah Berke, César Pelli, and Philip Johnson, as well as homegrown talents like Edward Pierre and Ewing Miller in addition to the many notable living designers working in the state today. It includes designers who left the state, like Woollen, but did not return, including Nathaniel Owens, Lebbeus Woods, and Isamu Noguchi. For a national audience, What a Building Does is a reminder that Indiana can be fertile ground for serious architecture, even when the outside world wasn’t looking.
This reminder feels especially important now as conversations across the country increasingly focus on belonging, public memory, civic identity, and the value of place. Woollen’s work offers a helpful model by presenting a modernist style deeply rooted in Hoosier sensibilities. His architecture was practical but not dull, creative but not indulgent, and confident but not arrogant. One of our most famous Hoosier authors, Kurt Vonnegut, wrote in his novel Mother Night, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.” Woollen’s buildings urge Indiana to pretend to be nothing other than what it already is: thoughtful, practical, and occasionally ambitious.
If the book leaves any threads unexplored, it is in its geographic focus. Woollen’s national work, his unbuilt projects, and his early East Coast houses deserve the same attention given to his Indiana structures. Of course, the focus on Indiana work has the advantage of making the book coherent, accessible, and grounded in place.
At the Landmark Columbus Foundation we often say that great places are built intentionally. Woollen’s career exemplifies that idea. His architecture helps shape the identity of the places it inhabits. What a Building Does carries that message forward, encouraging readers to look again at the buildings around them, and to ask not only what they look like but what they do, and what they make possible.
Richard McCoy is the founding executive director of Landmark Columbus Foundation, where he advances design as a form of civic infrastructure through preservation, exhibitions, and public work.
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