The American industrialist Joseph Irwin Miller (1909-2004) was a noted patron of modern architecture and a leading figure in the Christian ecumenical and civil rights movements. Descended from a major banking and investment family, he studied at Yale and Balliol College, Oxford, before in 1934 (aged just 25) he took over a failing diesel company. This was Cummins Engines, which had been founded by mechanic Clessie Cummins with financial support from Miller’s great-grandfather, William G Irwin, for whom he had been chauffeur. Cummins was Miller’s best man at his wedding. In 2003, just before Miller’s death, Cummins’ sales touched $6 billion.
The Millers were outstanding architectural patrons, working with Eilel Saarinen, and then Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames, who Miller was asked to look after when they were young office assistants. They became close friends and Eero designed a series of buildings for Cummins, Miller’s other family businesses, his family and local community in his home town of Columbus, Indiana.
Cummins established its first manufacturing plant outside the United States in 1956 at Shotts in Lanarkshire, where the later plant by Ahrends, Burton & Koralek from the 1970s is listed Grade A. In 1963 - 1966 it opened two factories in Darlington on land that had been acquired by the county borough in the 1930s for an airport before a nearby RAF station was adapted instead. The first and largest factory was initially developed with Chrysler in 1963-1965 to the designs of James Cubitt & Partners, but became wholly owned by Cummins in 1968. It was followed in 1964-1966 by the slightly smaller engine plant, making components for the main factory, designed by Roche & Dinkeloo, who took over Eero Saarinen’s practice after the latter’s sudden death in 1961.
Eero Saarinen (1910-1961), with his father Eliel (1873-1950), was a pioneer of out-of-town office headquarters and manufacturing plants. He was born in Finland, where his father had a successful architectural practice with Herman Geselius and Armas Lindgren. They are perhaps best known for Helsinki Railway Station (1910-1914). The Saarinens and their two children moved to the United States in 1923, where Eliel joined the Cranbrook Educational Community, intended from 1925 to be an American equivalent to the Bauhaus devoted to the arts and industrial design. Eliel also designed the research headquarters of General Motors, at Warren, Michigan, which was a new form of industrial campus and the largest commission of his career, which Eero took over after his father’s death in 1950.
Following Eero’s sudden death, his practice was taken over by his assistant (Eamonn) Kevin Roche (1922-2019), working with a slightly older partner John Dinkeloo (1918-1981) in charge of technical matters so that the young Irishman could concentrate on design. Roche had become Eero’s design assistant in 1950 and with John Dinkeloo completed 12 major buildings left unfinished by Saarinen before forming their own practice in 1966. The Cummins Engine Factory at Darlington was among the first schemes published under their own names. Like Saarinen, Roche worked in a great variety of materials and styles, but on a larger, often heroic scale. Though much of their best work was produced as Roche & Dinkeloo, it was Kevin Roche who took the plaudits, winning the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1982 and AIA Gold Medal in 1993, the two highest awards for a living architect.
Dan Kiley (1912-2004) was born in Boston and became interested in landscape architecture as a schoolboy while working at weekends caddying at the local golf courses. He attended the Harvard University Graduate School of Design in 1936-1938 while working with the landscape architect Warren Manning (who had worked for Frederick Law Olmstead and founded the American Society of Landscape Architects): he found the course still bound up with what he called ‘the dry symmetries of the Beaux-Arts’, and he, James Rose and Garrett Eckbo produced a series of articles calling for a new, more functional landscape architecture. He then worked for the National Park service and the United States Housing Authority, where he met Louis Kahn, who advised him to set up his own practice. During the Second World War he served in the Office of Strategic Services where he met Eero Saarinen, who secured him a job as chief of design that enabled him to visit the great French C17 landscapes and to build the courthouse for the Nuremberg Trials. In 1947 he won a competition to design the landscape for the park surrounding Eero Saarinen’s Gateway Arch in St Louis, Missouri, which brought them both to national attention (realised 1963-1965). In 1951 he established an office in Charlotte, Vermont, United States where he worked for some 50 years and he and his wife Anne raised eight children.
Considered the father of modern landscape architecture in the United States, Kiley combined modern design ideals with classical principles. His work was minimal and geometric, heavily structured with water, paths, trees and lawns. He worked extensively with Eero Saarinen, beginning in 1944 to 1947 when they collaborated at Antioch College, Ohio, a higher education campus. Kiley provided the landscape for the Irwin Union Trust Company in Columbus, Indiana (1950-1954); Miller’s own house at Columbus (1953-1957, with Roche as an assistant), and the North Christian Church, Columbus (1959-1964). He also worked with Saarinen on the University of Michigan’s campus at Ann Arbor (1951-1956); the Concordia Senior College at Fort Wayne, Indiana (1953-1958), and Dulles International Airport at Chantilly, Virginia (1958-1963).
Kiley’s first essentially modern design was the geometric landscape of the Miller House. Kiley wrote that it was based on 'the transparency between interior and exterior space…The house/landscape construct is more about the flow of articulated space than about reaching a static destination. One of the first moves was to pull the floor plane into the landscape. I worked closely with Saarinen’s associate, Kevin Roche, to configure a nine-inch plinth that extends twenty-five feet out from the house'. The same could be said on a simpler level of the Darlington work. Kiley’s other major projects included the John F Kennedy Library in Boston, the Air Force Academy in Colorado, Rockefeller University in Manhattan, and Fountain Place in Dallas. Other works by Kiley in Europe include the landscaping of La Defence outside of Paris. Roche in turn considered Kiley 'the most distinguished landscape architect of the twentieth century'.
The Cummins Engine Factory was published in a number of architectural journals after its construction, illustrated with photographs and plans of the building and the site, which showed the layout of the building, car park, pool and trees. A colour photograph in the Architectural Forum in October 1966 shows the grass of the landscape studded with small yellow flowers. It was described as 'an open prairie-like landscape with the minimum of visual interruption…' (Made in Mid-Atlantic, Architectural Review, volume 142, number 845, July 1967, 14).