Birkerts, Gunnar

Birkerts, Gunnar
719 Fifth Street Columbus, IN 47201

Gunnar Birkerts was associated in Columbus, Indiana, with Lincoln Elementary School—now CSA Lincoln Elementary—and St. Peter’s Lutheran Church. Born in Riga, Latvia, he studied architecture at the Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart, Germany, before immigrating to the United States in 1949. Early in his American career, he worked for Perkins & Will, Eero Saarinen, and Minoru Yamasaki, later establishing his own practice in the Detroit area and teaching architecture at the University of Michigan from 1959 to 1990. In Columbus, Birkerts brought a distinctive late-modern approach shaped by bold geometry, dramatic use of light, and inventive spatial form. Lincoln Elementary was dedicated in 1967 with First Lady Lady Bird Johnson and later received both an AIA Honor Award and the Bartlett Award. Birkerts died in 2017.

Columbus, Indiana projects
• Lincoln Elementary School (now CSA Lincoln Elementary), 750 Fifth Street, 1967.
• St. Peter’s Lutheran Church, 719 Fifth Street, 1988.


Honors
• Fellow of the American Institute of Architects (FAIA), 1970.
• AIA Honor Award for Lincoln Elementary School.

Work in Columbus