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Indiana Avenue has been a cultural spine for more than a century, once alive with jazz and blues music, Black enterprise and community. The canal invites gathering, walking and positive interaction.
This setting demands a landmark gateway, a beautiful vibrant place where students, residents, workers and visitors interact, feel safe and enjoy life.
The Walker Building made a bold statement when it opened in 1927. It was a beacon of pride and progress. A century later, it remains proud, but much of the surrounding African American history has been erased. Indiana Avenue today is a fragmented streetscape with lots of unattractive asphalt surface parking, making it unappealing to area residents, students and office workers, more a place to pass through than to go to.
Indiana Avenue should be a beautifully inviting connector between downtown and the twin campuses of Indiana University and Purdue University, with their combined 30,000 students. Today it is not.
A single, well-considered gateway building will begin to repair the urban fabric and give the Walker Building the company she has long deserved. If we start now, the gateway could open as a fitting companion to the Walker, arriving just in time for her 100th birthday. The 501 Indiana Avenue project is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create a gateway, one that signals arrival, welcome and identity for both Purdue and the city of Indianapolis.
Purdue’s decision to build its flagship urban campus on Indiana Avenue is a transformative commitment to Indianapolis, affirming the university’s urban presence, academic excellence and the vitality of the corridor. History shows that great institutions uniformly have great architecture that positively influences how students, faculty, visitors and neighbors esteem and experience them. This is Purdue’s big chance for Indianapolis.
The 501 Indiana Avenue design revisions conceived and developed by Chatham Park Development with Classic Planning Institute align with Purdue’s goals. It takes the university’s desire for a building that reflects its stature and elevates it with a level of civic engagement and architecture that the site and the university deserve.
This vision builds on Purdue’s own architectural traditions—limestone and brick, balanced proportions and landmark character that defines great university buildings like Purdue’s University Hall and the Memorial Union. We adapted these qualities to an urban canal-side to bring magnificence—lifting both the university and its physical surroundings like a beacon. We made it beautifully complementary to the university, the avenue and its surroundings.
Now is a period of growth and transformation for the city and the university. The 501 Indiana building is a fulcrum of future advancement for both.
Purdue’s presence on Indiana Avenue is already a major step forward. The exterior redesign ensures that growth is marked by quality that will inspire for many generations. When this gateway building succeeds beautifully, it will be more than just an address. It will be part of the shared mental map of the city and a touchstone of local identity. This is the chance to create a gateway worthy of Purdue, of Indiana Avenue’s history and the city’s future.•
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Vezolles is CEO and president of Chatham Park Development.
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Without a compatible and descriptive plan graphic or rendering, this column seems nothing more than a promotional marketing statement.