44 United States The EconomistSeptember 14th 2019
Y
ears beforeI.M.Pei designed the
Louvre Pyramid in Paris or the Bank
of China Tower in Hong Kong, he
planned a squat yet elegant library in a
midwestern city of 50,000 people. In
Columbus, Indiana, Pei’s Modernist Cleo
Rogers Memorial Library sits across 5th
Street from Eliel Saarinen’s First Chris-
tian Church. The imposing glass-fronted
structure is only the second-most attrac-
tive of Saarinen’s churches in Columbus.
North Christian Church, with its slender
spire and vaulted concrete interior, takes
pride of place. Across town, the white
bricks of Robert Venturi’s Fire Station 4
recline in a sly number four.
Some argue that America’s best city
for architecture is Chicago. Others favour
Miami’s Art Deco legacy, the dilapidated
elegance of New Orleans or the jumbled
cosiness of San Francisco. But to see the
greatest collection of Modernist master-
pieces in the smallest space, fly to India-
napolis and drive south-east for about an
hour to Columbus, the Hoosier State’s
21st-largest city and birthplace of Ameri-
ca’s vice-president, Mike Pence.
It was also home to Joseph IrwinMiller, a native son who built the Cum-
mins Engine Company into an industrial
powerhouse. In the middle of the last
century, he began commissioning rising
young architects to design the city’s
public buildings in the hope of attracting
young engineers to southern Indiana.
The town boosts its legacy in Exhibit
Columbus, an annual festival that al-
ternates between a symposium and
installations across town. This year’s 18
installations include a garden between
Pei’s library and Saarinen’s church, and a
glass and carbon-fibre tower outside the
other Saarinen church.
But Columbus also showcases its
legacy in the care paid to design in its
elegant downtown. Across from a school
designed by Gunnar Birkerts sits a Lu-
theran church. Parishioners liked his
work so much they hired him to build an
addition. The University of Indiana
recently opened an architecture school
in an old newspaper building; two pro-
fessors designed a set of lattice panels
leading to the front door. Miller did not
just give his home town some important
buildings. He gave it an identity.Modernism in the cornfields
I.M.probableCOLUMBUS, INDIANA
A small town’sbig architectural legacyVisitors can check out a library designed by I.M.PeiI
n Americait is no longer merely accept-
able to meet your romantic partner on
the internet. It is the norm. The latest data
from a long-running survey by researchers
at Stanford, released this summer, shows
that 40% of new heterosexual couples met
online in 2017, far more than at bars,
through friends or at work. For gay couples
the proportion is even higher, at 60%.
Little wonder, then, that Facebook is
bringing a dating service to the richest den-
izens of its internet fief. Facebook Dating
launched in America on September 5th,
having been tested first in smaller markets
such as Colombia and Canada. American
Facebook users seeking significant others
can now find the dating service in a dedi-
cated tab within the firm’s smartphone
app. Willing daters must explicitly create a
profile and fill in their preferences. Users
may, if they wish, tap into their social
graph to look for matches among friends of
friends, but that option is not on by default.
Facebook says any data generated while
searching will be kept separate from its
main service and not used to target ads.
Facebook Dating has the potential to
break one of the most interesting features
of internet dating. Most dating apps pair up
strangers, rather than friends of friends.
For instance Tinder, the most popular dat-
ing app, pairs people up by allowing them
to choose from a menu of potential part-
ners within a set radius of where they are.
okCupid, a more old-school text-based ap-
proach, asks users to read through a profile.
Real-life pairings are usually circum-
scribed by a person’s social sphere, and the
chances of meeting a total stranger are low.
But online most people are paired with
strangers. Some sociology research sug-
gests that this means that online dating has
the potential to create couples from more
diverse backgrounds than would tend to
form in real life, possibly helping to reduce
income inequality over time.
Facebook’s effort will also make it possi-
ble to match anonymously, but trawling
through friends of friends is likely to prove
more alluring. Thus Facebook is remaking
the old world that was governed by social
ties, probably reducing any benefits that
may have come with less assortative cou-
pling through online dating.
These are inauspicious times for Mark
Zuckerberg’s company to roll out a dating
service. The firm is under antitrust investi-
gation from attorneys-general in eightAmerican states and the District of Colum-
bia. The firm’s record on handling user data
is poor. Adding dating information to the
mix—which includes sexual orientation
and, perhaps, hivstatus—seems bold at
best, misguided at worst.
Still, recent history suggests Facebook
Dating will be a success. The firm has more
tools at its disposal to help its amorous us-
ers find a good match than any other datingservice, thanks to its huge user base and its
trove of their data. Although user growth
on Facebook itself is slowing, users seem
generally unfazed by the firm’s numerous
missteps. Its other services, including
WhatsApp and Instagram, are still growing
strongly. If that success is anything to go
by, it suggests that future versions of the
Stanford survey may do well to break out a
new category of coupling: Facebook. 7Facebook’s new dating service could
return dating to its pre-internet waysStatus updateFriends with
benefits