Before he helped bring the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen to his hometown to design one of the first contemporary churches in America; before he commissioned Eliel’s son, Eero, to design an elegant midcentury modern house for his young family; and before he turned Columbus, Ind., into a living museum of striking 20th-century modern architecture, J. Irwin Miller lived in a large 19th-century house that could not have been more of a contrast to the Modernist buildings that have put this rural city on the map.

The Italianate brick Irwin-Sweeney-Miller House in which Mr. Miller grew up, built by his great-grandfather Joseph I. Irwin in 1864, is now a bed-and-breakfast called the Inn at Irwin Gardens (608 Fifth Street, 812-376-3663, irwingardens.com). Spending the night there, as my husband and I and several friends did last fall, is a physical immersion (with comfortable beds, chocolates on pillows and thick towels) into the contrasts and diversity that is Columbus.

Unless you are an architecture buff, when you think of Columbus, you are more likely to think of Ohio’s capital, Columbus, not of a southern Indiana city ranked sixth among the nation’s cities in 1991 for its architectural innovation and design by the American Institute of Architects.

For years the Columbus Area Visitors Center has offered bus tours of the city’s innovative public buildings (the Visitors Center lists some 70 structures as “noteworthy”), many designed by a litany of important American architects: I. M. Pei, Harry Weese, Robert A. M. Stern, Richard Meier, Kevin Roche, Robert Venturi, Cesar Pelli and others.