Designed by internationally acclaimed architect
Richard Meier, the Atheneum has received numerous design awards, including the Progressive Architecture Award for 1979, the American Institute of Architects Award in 1982, and the Twenty-five Year Award in 2008. The stunning building, which serves as the Visitors Center for New Harmony, houses exhibits on the communal history of New Harmony, a large theater where an orientation film on the town is shown, and the Museum Shop.
"The Atheneum is a building that encourages exploration and challenges established definitions and perceptions of space, much as the Harmonist and Owen movements challenged established definitions of community. While unabashedly stark, the three-story building clad in white porcelain steel-backed panels is intertwined with the landscape, taking its cues from both the natural and manmade, its undulating west elevation recalling the contour of the adjacent river and its rigidly formal east elevation a nod to the gridded plan of New Harmony. The building is dynamic, both in terms of shifts in grids and planes and in the plays of shadow and light that alter perception of the space as the sun passes over and penetrates into the building." -SAH Archepedia
Its impact when it first opened was well captured by Ada Louise Huxtable in 1979: “On the banks of the Wabash River, not far from the corn fields of Indiana, stands a dramatically handsome new building representing architecture’s most advanced frontier. This gleaming white structure is as radical an addition to the rural American heartland as Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoie was to the French countryside at Poissy half-a-century ago.”
The modern design of the Atheneum was set intentionally next to the log cabins you first visit on the tour of Historic New Harmony, to remind us that this living village is not a museum, trapped in time, but a community, moving forward into the future.
