Note: The last Atheneum Tours of the 2025 season will be on Sunday, December 14, 2025.
The Atheneum is where your visit to New Harmony begins. It's our visitors' center, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Richard Meier and completed in 1979. But it's also an architectural landmark in its own right and understanding why it exists and how it was designed adds another layer to New Harmony's story.
The Atheneum is deliberately modern, sitting at the edge of the historic district like a white geometric sculpture. Some people love it immediately. Others need the story before it makes sense. Either way, it's worth understanding what Meier was trying to do and why Jane Blaffer Owen commissioned it.
The Atheneum Tour explores the building's design, its relationship to New Harmony's history and the vision behind bringing contemporary architecture to a historic town.
Richard Meier designed the Atheneum as a visitors' center, but also as an architectural statement. The building's white panels, geometric forms and dramatic ramps were intentional choices. You'll explore the design elements: why the building looks the way it does, how it functions, what Meier was thinking.
Jane Blaffer Owen commissioned the Atheneum as part of her larger vision for New Harmony: honoring the past while creating space for contemporary thought and creativity. The tour explains how this building fits into that vision and why bringing modern architecture to a historic town made sense to her.
The building's design creates specific views of New Harmony and the Wabash River. The ramps, windows and orientation aren't accidental, but frame what Meier wanted visitors to see and experience. You'll understand how the building directs your attention and shapes your introduction to the town.
The Atheneum is beautiful, but it's also a working visitors' center. The tour explores how the building functions: what works well, what's challenging and how architecture serves (or sometimes doesn't serve) practical needs.
The Atheneum doesn't stand alone. It's part of a broader story about preservation, contemporary architecture in historic settings and what it means to let a place evolve rather than freezing it in time. The tour connects the building to those bigger questions.
The tour includes our 12-minute orientation film, Utopia: The New Harmony Experience, about contemporary New Harmony. The film gives you context about the town today: how it functions as both a historic site and a living community, the preservation work that's happened over decades and what makes this place unique.
On-demand. Ask for this tour at the information desk on the first floor.
Free
Approximately 20 minutes
Inside the Atheneum Visitors Center
Not required
Nothing special required. If you want to take photographs of the architecture, bring your camera. Personal photography is welcome. We ask that you be respectful of other visitors and refrain from using flash around collection items. Commercial photography requires advance permission.
If you're interested in modern architecture, Richard Meier's work or how contemporary design interacts with historic contexts, this tour is for you.
Maybe you walked in and thought, "What is this doing here?" The tour answers that question.
The Atheneum represents a particular approach to historic preservation, one that embraces contemporary additions rather than trying to recreate or freeze the past. If you're interested in those questions, the tour explores them.
New Harmony's history didn't end in 1827. The 20th-century preservation work, including the Atheneum, is part of the ongoing story. This tour fills in that piece.
The Atheneum Tour works well combined with our History Tour. One gives you the 19th-century utopian experiments. The other gives you 20th-century preservation and architectural vision as well as contemporary life in the community. Together, they show how New Harmony has evolved across two centuries.
You don't need a tour to visit the Atheneum. It's our visitors' center, so you're welcome to come in, look around and experience the space. The building itself is open during our regular hours.
The Atheneum Tour gives you context, explains design choices you might not notice on your own and helps you understand why this building exists and what it's trying to do. If you care about architecture or want to understand New Harmony's preservation story more fully, the tour adds significant value.
Contact the Atheneum at 812-682-4474 for more information or to book your tour.