University Design Research Fellows Aleksandr Mergold, Andrew Fu, and Aaron Goldstein had never been to Columbus before last October, but as practicing architects, they knew it was a mid-century mecca.

“I always thought it was like Oz,” said Mergold, the team leader. “Everybody knows about it, but only a few people have been.” 

When they did come, they had no idea what shape their project would take. But as they met with their site partner, the Bartholomew County Historical Society, and explored the city, the design evolved organically, with one significant encounter leading to the next. 

During their initial meeting with Diane Robbins and the staff at the Historical Society, they noticed a lone building across the street situated diagonally to the street grid. When they asked for historical documentation, the staff introduced them to Tami Iorio, the Bartholomew County Historian, who shared Sanborn Fire Insurance Co. maps and aerial photographs dating back to the 1890s. 

They discovered that Columbus was once served by a major railroad infrastructure that cut diagonally across the city center amid an industrial cityscape of warehouses, corn cribs and silos, a locomotive turntable under what is now First Christian Church, and numerous stables populated by teams of horses. 

“When the railroad was coming through town you would have seen it and smelled it and heard it—and horses, too—in daily life,” Goldstein said. “But now the things that make our way of life possible—electricity, water, sewage—all happen out of sight. We need to deal with these real materials and put the spotlight on them and get in touch.” 

Mergold agreed and added, “I’m most excited about the aspect of using borrowed things to make a temporary installation,” he said, “that something this big – 60 feet long by 25 wide and as tall — can come together out of the thin air of Columbus and the stuff the thing is made out of can disappear back into the landscape without leaving any trace.” 

While they waited for an appointment with the Department of Public Works, they wandered over to the Kroot scrapyard, where the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely once found the material for his Chaos sculpture (located downtown in The Commons). Kroot offered bundles of steel scrap, the DPW offered the standard posts for street signs as well as their street-striping machine to help the group “daylight” the lost buildings from the Sanborn maps, and the Historical Society offered fiberglass panels from the recent renovation of the First Christian Church tower. 

The resultant Steel Horsie is a metal frame that sits on axis with the former train tracks and recalls the nearby stables. The bales of scrap steel created the foundations, and the frames of street signposts were assembled on the ground and then lifted in a “barn-raising,” a salute to the area’s agricultural past. The geometry was dictated by the necessity to return the posts intact. Hay-bale seats allow observers to sit below the Horsie as they engage with the piece and one another. Goldstein, a collector and scholar of antique rugs, offered a traditional Uzbek camel trapping as a reference for a patchwork fabric trellis that could cover the Horsie and create an island of shade.

The team designed a series of custom brackets to join the signposts. Makerspace technicians at the New Jersey Institute of Technology collaborated with the team to prototype and fabricate the system from aluminum sheets. 

While the team is bringing something exciting to Columbus, they say they are also taking something away: “The idea that somehow corporate leadership can do things in a benevolent way as opposed to the negative things it has been involved in lately,” Mergold said. “The Miller family demonstrated that it can be visionary and productive.”

Fu said it is critical to bring the parts together in conversation with one another—architectural panels from First Christian Church with material bales as well as the street-sign struts. “The materials embody different histories that speak not only to the past but raise questions about the present and future.”