The riverfront bet: Century Center, 1977

1974 - 1977

The building: Fourteen years after the Studebaker closing, South Bend made the same bet Fort Wayne had made, in its own idiom. Century Center rose on the banks of the West Race of the St. Joseph River downtown, designed by Philip Johnson and John Burgee, two of the most famous architects in America, construction beginning in 1974 and the doors opening on 1 November 1977, at a cost of $13 million. It was urban renewal in the post-factory sense: a convention and culture complex planted where the city's confidence had been, housing the South Bend Museum of Art from its opening day and the 600-seat Bendix Theatre. The building's architecture stands in the architecture material; its cultural meaning is the comparison this section exists to draw. Fort Wayne in 1961 hired Louis Kahn to draw nine buildings and could afford one. South Bend in 1974 hired Johnson and Burgee to draw one big building and finished it. The factory cities of Indiana spent the 1960s and 1970s buying culture by the building, each at the scale its grief allowed.

The wager's terms: Century Center also fixed the geography of the culture this section describes: the museum inside it, the Morris two blocks away, the Civic Theatre's eventual home on Main Street, all of it within a short walk of the river the city was named for bending around. When the Downtown South Bend 2045 Plan proposed in 2025 to demolish the Center's north wing, it was this wager, nearly fifty years old, that came back onto the table; the museum's lease vote of August 2026 is recorded in the museum's article above. The building outlasted the strategy that built it, which is the usual fate of cultural infrastructure, and precisely why cities keep building it.

Sources:

1. Building South Bend, University of Notre Dame (Century Center: Philip Johnson and John Burgee; the opening of 1 November 1977; the $13 million cost).
2. Century Center reference accounts (construction from 1974; the West Race site; the South Bend Museum of Art and the 600-seat Bendix Theatre as original tenants).
3. South Bend Common Council resolution 4261-13 and the Downtown South Bend 2045 Plan record (the building's civic history and the 2025 north wing proposal, the latter as reported by the South Bend Tribune, August 2026).