A Lincoln Center for a factory city: the Kahn commission, 1961

1959 - 1964

The ambition: In 1959 the Fine Arts Foundation studied the needs of arts and culture in Fort Wayne, and the model it chose was the most ambitious in America: Lincoln Center in New York City. The Arts Campus history records the sequence plainly. Arts United, then the Fine Arts Foundation, embarked in 1961 on a plan to revitalise downtown Fort Wayne by building a multi-venue cultural district, and after a nationwide search it hired Louis I. Kahn, by common account the most prominent American architect of the second half of the twentieth century, to design it. Kahn was formally hired in 1962, the campus history gives both years because the commission and the contract straddle them, and he worked the scheme from 1961 to 1964 alongside his Richards Medical Center in Philadelphia.

The shortfall, printed whole: ArchDaily's AD Classics account gives the collision in numbers. Kahn's expansive Fine Arts Center, a complex of nine or ten buildings around central courts, a philharmonic hall, art school, gallery, civic theatre, historical museum and amphitheatre, was estimated by the architect at 20 million dollars against the 2.5 million the foundation expected to spend. By 1964 funding was scarce and the plans were put on hold. Of the original vision only one building would ever be realised. The shortfall is printed here at full size because it is the cultural fact: a city of about 180,000 commissioned the century's leading architect to build it a cultural capital, and could afford one theatre of the nine buildings drawn. Fort Wayne's cultural history from 1964 onward is the story of that one building, and of the district slowly assembling itself around it by other means over the following half century.

Sources:

1. ArchDaily, AD Classics: Arts United Center / Louis Kahn (Evan Pavka, 16 April 2018: the 1961 commission; the Lincoln Center in miniature; the community of 180,000; the nine-building scheme of 1961-64; Kahn's 20 million dollar estimate against the expected 2.5 million; the 1964 hold; only the Theatre of Performing Arts completed).
2. Arts United, Arts Campus Fort Wayne history (the 1959 needs study modelled on Lincoln Center; Louis I. Kahn hired in 1962 to design the multi-venue arts complex; of the original 10-building vision, only one realised).
3. Arts Campus Fort Wayne, A Soaring Vision, 2023 Capital Campaign booklet (the 1961 embarkation on the downtown cultural district vision).