Though the population of Boswell, Ind., is only 800, according to the 2020 census, its motto remains The Hub of the Universe. Founded in the late 19th century as a farming community, the Benton County town’s motto originally referenced its former position on US 41—a two-lane, north-south highway that runs along the Illinois/Indiana border and passed through Boswell, making the town a hotspot for travelers going from the Great Lakes to southern Indiana. But in the late 1950s, Interstate 65 was completed, giving travelers a streamlined passage from north to south, and in 1977, US 41 was updated—rerouted eastward—and bypassed Boswell entirely.
Today, Boswell’s downtown is dwindling. The town was born of the farming industry, populated by workers and their families, and, like many other rural towns, it was fed—and later bled—by transportation infrastructure. But these developments shouldn’t write Boswell off the map, says Catherine Baker, FAIA. Instead, her new firm, Nowhere Collaborative, is working to reaffirm Boswell as the Hub of the Universe, embracing what it means to be a ‘working town’ of Indiana’s future.
It's #watertowerwednesday! This one is from the “Hub of the Universe,” Boswell, Indiana – taken by Kelly Gardner. #ruralwater pic.twitter.com/zSkBLnUkEq
— Alliance of Indiana Rural Water (AIRW) (@allianceinh2o) July 9, 2020
Baker, who has lived part-time in the outskirts of Boswell since 2009, was enchanted by its ‘working town’ mentality. “It’s not some quaint little town. We think about this concept of nostalgia and small towns and it’s not really that,” Baker says. “What’s appealing about Boswell is it’s not touristy.” Small downtown amenities such as groceries, restaurants, and a post office once served radial farming residents. Today, she says, while the grain elevators and the railroad still cater to farmers who are selling and transporting their crops, what’s left of the downtown is a town hall, a senior center, one restaurant, an ice cream parlor, the post office, and a few other small businesses. In May 2021, the town’s one grade school, Boswell Elementary, closed, leaving behind an empty—albeit immaculately maintained—building. “The school was in perfect shape, but was odd because it was an open classroom plan,” Baker explains. “We typically think of turning schools into housing because of the double-loaded corridor and lots of windows, but this wasn’t quite like that.”
Just a few months later, the school was purchased by J.O.B.S. Renewable Fund, a Benton County–based nonprofit that provides scholarships and funding for sustainable energy ideas. In October 2021, the organization leased the school to Auxilius, a wind turbine servicer that founded a program designed to train a new workforce in its technology and service the state’s more than 1,200 operational wind turbines. The first wind turbines in Indiana were built in Benton County in 2008; teaching the next generation of turbine professionals in Boswell seemed fitting.
The school’s reuse sparked a question about the town’s future, Baker says. “Auxilius didn’t need to take over the whole school, so suddenly I saw the building as a catalyst. How do you look beyond farming? And how do you look to the future?”
‘I don’t know why we as architects don’t don’t see these as places with great opportunities to find unique solutions; they’re not the same solutions that you might find in urban areas where there are more people and resources’
Baker has since set up the Nowhere office inside the Boswell school, helping to support employment growth by building infrastructure such as short-term housing for incoming employees, artists, musicians, or writers seeking residencies. She cites the New Orleans–based firm OJT’s two Travelers Hotels—which employ and house local artists as managers of small hotels in semi-rural towns like Clarksdale, Mississippi—as inspiration. “They’ve solved housing issues for artists, who are usually low income, and creating a tourist income generator. And so it’s like, how do you start with these kind of complicated, atypical combinations that then snowball into something bigger?” Baker says.
Such a solution is not an obvious one, she continues, and is contrary to the one-size-fits-all solutions that are typical to affordable housing. By embedding herself in Boswell and collaborating with residents on incremental development, Nowhere plays off “now here”—a nod to Baker’s plan to create small-scale, temporary, and experimental interventions to capture these types of atypical ideas for the town’s future.
GEOID 1806706 Boswell, Indiana pic.twitter.com/V4aKpZzfZi
— Every Census Place (retired) (@everyusplace) February 4, 2022
Baker is taking her cues from her decades working in affordable housing at Landon Bone Baker Architects in Chicago, where she saw top-down government policy decisions impacting the design and scope of housing solutions. Instead, she asks, “what if you were actually part of the community and not specializing in one type of building, but could think about everything in a community from temporary installations, all the way up to large-scale planning? Then you can vertically look at the problems, issues, or opportunities in a different way.”
Nowhere Collaborative is shaping a different model for an architectural practice, one that is embedded in the small, middle places that often lack the same types of attention or resources paid to other rural areas that benefit from proximity to natural beauty, historical preservation initiatives, or wealthy investors. These places require plans for resilience—both combatting climate change, and creating economic and social opportunity. “I don’t know why we as architects don’t see these [areas] as places with great opportunities to find unique solutions; they’re not the same solutions that you might find in urban areas where there are more people and resources,” Baker says. Rural towns like Boswell have always been a hub of the universe for residents; when imagining the future of those places, it’s a matter of growing that hub from within.
The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine or of The American Institute of Architects.
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