Concordia — Eero Saarinen's Village (1953–1958)

In 1953 the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod commissioned Eero Saarinen and Associates to design an entire campus on Fort Wayne's northeast side for a new institution, Concordia Senior College, the synod's pre-seminary senior college. Saarinen took the flat, featureless 191-acre site and answered it with a community rather than a quadrangle. "The solution seemed to lie in the village concept," he said at the dedication — a group of low, steep-roofed buildings, modeled on a Scandinavian village and grouped around a man-made lake, that would reflect and enhance the college's communal character. Dan Kiley was the landscape architect. The firm designed the very materials: a custom whitewashed, diamond-patterned "Concordia brick" and black roof tile made for the campus. The contemporary synod report counted 28 buildings — ten main buildings, twelve residence halls, counselors' residences and faculty housing — built over three years at a cost of $8,000,000, and formally dedicated on May 30, 1958. (The synod's own Theological Observer put the campus at 187 acres; the National Building Museum's account and most subsequent sources give 191.)

At the village's center stands Kramer Chapel: a triangular, A-framed volume in the Concordia brick, lit indirectly — daylight seeps in along the edges of the steep roof rather than through windows — with a 106-foot bell tower beside it, a 50-foot aluminum cross on the chancel wall, and a 1958 Schlicker organ. It is counted among Saarinen's finest small buildings. Concordia Senior College was closed by synodical resolution in the 1970s (it shut its doors in 1977); Concordia Theological Seminary moved onto the campus from Springfield, Illinois, in 1976, and occupies Saarinen's village today. A tornado that struck the campus in 2001 damaged the grounds, but most of Saarinen's buildings escaped serious harm.

Sources: Concordia Theological Monthly, Theological Observer (September 1958), the contemporary dedication report; National Building Museum, Blueprints (Spring/Summer 2008), "Architectural Concord," drawing on the Eero Saarinen Collection, Yale University; Dezeen, "Five mid-century gems in unlikely architecture haven Fort Wayne" (2017); Atomic Ranch (Fall 2026), for the Concordia brick; Fort Wayne Chapter, American Guild of Organists, pipe organ gallery, for the Schlicker organ.