Join us at New Canaan Library for a free lecture by Richard McCoy, Executive Director of Landmark Columbus Foundation. Columbus, Indiana, is home to an extraordinary concentration of modernist landmarks: works by Eero Saarinen, Eliot Noyes, I.M. Pei, and other luminaries that have made it one of the most architecturally significant small cities in the world, and a model for other modernist communities to consider.

For seventy years, Columbus been proving that design excellence is not a matter of taste but a civic discipline. McCoy makes the case that the field of modern architecture preservation now needs more than admiration: shared methods, honest accounting, and real evidence of what it takes to sustain good decisions across generations. Drawing on Landmark Columbus Foundation’s work in progressive preservation, public design, and civic memory, McCoy shows how one small city built the conditions that most communities are still trying to name.

Richard McCoy is the founding Executive Director of Landmark Columbus Foundation, a non-profit organization whose purpose is to demonstrate what design excellence can mean to a community, earned through discipline, proven in public, and cared for as a legacy for the future. The organization features three programming arms: Progressive Preservation, Exhibit Columbus, and the Civic Design Office. McCoy has a long history of creating unique solutions to complex cultural heritage challenges and occasionally teaches and writes about the arts. He has worked as a conservator-restorer for museums and libraries specializing in contemporary art, sculptures, traveling exhibitions, and bookbinding. He has degrees from New York University and Indiana University.

Glass House Presents is an ongoing series of talks, performances, and other live events that extend the site’s historic role as a gathering place for artists, architects, and other creative minds. This event is co-hosted by New Canaan Library and supported in part by the New Canaan Community Foundation.