J. Irwin Miller

In 2016 Exhibit Columbus launched the J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller Prize, an award given to artists, architects, and designers whose work is for the benefit of communities.

Upon Miller's death in 2004, the National Council of Churches in the United States instituted an annual J. Irwin Miller Award. The award is presented annually to "a lay person who has been a witness, through action in the world, to justice and other values affirmed by Christian faith, and who has demonstrated a commitment to church unity."

The Miller House which was designed by Eero Saarinen, was declared a U.S. National Historic Landmark in 2000. In 2010, after the death of Mrs. Miller, the house was donated to the Indianapolis Museum of Art. The family's Canadian summer home on Lake Rosseau near Windermere, Ontario, was also designed by Saarinen.

Miller also served as a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art, the Ford Foundation, and was a member of the Yale Corporation, which governs the university. In 1986 he received the National Building Museum's first Honor Award. He was member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

He was active in politics, persuading New York governor Nelson A. Rockefeller to run for president in 1968 (and served as national campaign chairman) and in 1972 he supported New York City Mayor John Lindsay's presidential bid.

In 1954, he established the Cummins Foundation and in 1957 made an offer to Columbus that the foundation would pay all the architects fees for new public buildings in Columbus. Thus this small Midwestern city has buildings by Eero Saarinen, Eliel Saarinen, I.M. Pei, Kevin Roche, Richard Meier, Harry Weese, César Pelli, Gunnar Birkerts, and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, many of which feature extensive interiors designed by Alexander Girard. "Some people have a tombstone at the head of their gravesite or at the foot of it," Columbus resident William Beaver wrote. "Mr. Miller had the whole town as a monument." The American Institute of Architects in 1991 declared Columbus America's sixth most important city in terms of architecture. In addition to altruism, Miller used architecture to entice the best people to work for Cummins.

In 1950, Miller helped to establish the National Council of Churches (NCC) and later served as its first lay president (1960–63). Miller chaired the NCC's Commission on Religion and Race, which coordinated organized religion’s support for strong civil rights legislation, and jointly sponsored the March on Washington. He led religious delegations that met with Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to push for the legislation that became the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

On February 5, 1943, he married Xenia Simons. They had three daughters, Margaret, Catherine, Elizabeth, and two sons, Hugh and William. He had ten grandchildren, Jonathan, Zachary, Joshua, Benjamin, Aaron, Andrew, AnnaCatherine, Katherine, Laura, and Emily.

Miller joined Cummins, the family business, in 1934. He was executive vice president from 1944 to 1947, president from 1947 to 1951, and chairman from 1951 to 1977. He served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy in the South Pacific during the Second World War.

Miller was a 1931 graduate of Yale University and made Phi Beta Kappa. From 1931 to 1933 he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at Balliol College, Oxford, which made him an Honorary Fellow in 1974.

Joseph Irwin Miller (May 26, 1909 – August 16, 2004) was an American industrialist, patron of modern architecture, and lay leader in the Christian ecumenical movement and civil rights. He was instrumental in the rise of the Cummins Corporation and in giving his hometown (Columbus, Indiana) international stature with its modern architecture buildings.

Miller was born in Columbus, Indiana, to Hugh Thomas Miller, a college professor and politician, and Nettie Irwin Sweeney. He had one sister, Elizabeth Clementine Miller (1905–1996), who married Robert Stone Tangeman.