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>> BRANDON: Coming up, tour an iconic piece of Indiana's rural history.

Meet a musician playing for all the marbles.

And discover a pair of artists reimagining the Indiana landscape.

That's all on this episode of "Journey Indiana."

♪ >> BRANDON: Welcome to "Journey Indiana."

I'm Brandon Wentz.

And we're coming to you from the Wylie House Museum in Bloomington.

Built in 1835, by Indiana University's first president Andrew Wylie, this stately house now serves the community as a public heritage site.

Furnished to resemble what it might have looked like in the 19th century, the home gives visitors a colorful glimpse into a formative time in the state's history.

And we'll learn all about this historic place in just a bit, but first, producer Jason Pear takes us to Miami County, for a real barn burner at the Indiana Barn Foundation's annual tour.

♪ >> I would say most people probably drive by barns every day, and don't think about how unique that barn may be because that's really what you run into when you get out and start to see these barns up close.

♪ Hand-hewn beams, hand-hewn posts.

They are really monuments, in my opinion, to farmers and farming.

It's important that we save these.

>> This desire to celebrate and save Indiana's historic barns is shared by the members of the Indiana Barn Foundation, an all-volunteer advocacy group founded a decade ago.

Part of the IBF's mission is to share that passion with the public, through events like their annual barn tour.

These driving tours allow barn owners, barn fans, and others to see a wide variety of historic structures in just one day.

♪ This year's tour took place in Miami County, and the first stop was the International Circus Hall of Fame.

On the former grounds of the Wallace Circus Winter Headquarters.

The Hall of Fame's two historic barns and grounds gave visitors a chance to experience a fascinating part of Indiana's past.

>> Those barns were very unique!

Built, again, for a very specific purpose.

The barn that we had our headquarters in was mainly a repair barn, for instance, but, of course, had hay storage above.

The next stop, for many, was an equally unique barn, albeit on a significantly smaller scale.

Known today as the Wallace-Poor Barn, it stands out in large part because of the materials used to construct it.

>> There are not a lot of brick barns.

There are a few, but even if you were making the bricks there, it's more expensive than building a wooden barn.

♪ >> Just a few miles away, guests toured a working barn with a connection to a famous Peru native, the composer and lyricist Cole Porter.

The property, named for one of Porter's early commercial successes, is home to beautiful gardens and a beautiful barn.

>> That barn was built a little bit later into the 1900s, and the upstairs is just cavernous.

>> That cavernous upstairs was a product of the barn's time.

>> The baled hay that all of us know now is a relatively recent invention.

100 years ago in the early 1900s, most hay was stored loose in these barns.

So it took a really big area, because loose hay is not nearly as compacted.

>> While hay became easier to store, farm machinery, especially in the '70s and '80s, became larger.

And barns built for an earlier style and scale of farming were no longer useful.

Because of that, countless barns have been lost, but others, like the Stein barn had been given a new life.

>> Great example of what you can do with a barn for it to be useful, not really in an agricultural sense, but to make it useful for storage and just for kind of a really nice party barn and man cave.

>> In all, there were seven barns on this year's tour, and one of the most popular stops was the learning lab at the Betzner barn.

There, Indiana Barn Foundation board member Randy Miles facilitated a conversation about barn preservation and restoration, similar to what the IBF offers through their in-person barn assessments.

>> He actually walked people through that barn and talked about some of the features, but some of the things that it needed.

>> And if that fits your budget and fits the criteria to maintain that vintage, heritage barn, that's great!

>> We feel like that is a really helpful thing that we can do to tour participants, without necessarily coming to their barn.

I'd say three years ago, we'd get a request for assessment maybe one every month or two.

We now have probably three or four -- we've had three since Saturday.

>> In addition to the tours and the increasingly popular assessments, the Indiana Barn Foundation hosts an annual meeting and provides $2,500 grants to assist with restoration efforts.

>> As you consider what it costs to fix these barns, $2,500 is not much.

We look at it as if -- if that's enough to encourage people to go ahead even do something, then there's value in that.

We're never gonna have the money to help everybody with their barn, but we do think we serve a valuable purpose because there's nobody else besides the Indiana Barn Foundation, who is trying to find a purpose and is trying to give value to these heritage barns that we believe are really important to us across the state.

>> BRANDON: You know, we see all of these historic cars and houses, and now to see these barns.

And that idea never occurred to me that as the time changes -- like a house is still a house and it still can be used the exact same way.

But the way that the barn was structured, as technology changed, made parts of them obsolete and could make them easily lost to history.

So it's really cool that they are taking the time to preserve these.

Want to learn more?

Head to Indianabarns.org.

Earlier, we spoke with Carey Champion, the director of the Wylie House Museum to learn more about this interesting place.

♪ >> The Wylie House Museum is the 1835 home of the first president of Indiana University, Andrew Wylie.

The Wylie House is also a unit of Indiana University Libraries.

So we have an academic mission, and we serve the campus in all sorts of ways.

So when President Wylie, his wife Margaret, and nine of what would eventually become 12 children arrived in Bloomington in 1829, they came to a really small town.

It was essentially considered the frontier.

There were less than 1,000 people here.

Indiana University had less than 37 -- well, actually, less than 40.

So 37 students.

There were two other professors.

It was a rapidly growing community.

After President Andrew Wylie and his wife Margaret both had passed away, Andrew's younger cousin, Theophilus Wylie assumed the house.

And Theophilus was also a professor here at IU.

He taught natural sciences.

He was a multilinguist.

He was an artist.

So the Wylie home was -- belonged to two families, essentially.

So the Andrew and Margaret Wylie family, and then the Theophilus and Rebecca Wylie family, between 1835 and 1913.

So to interpret the Wylie house and both of those families over such a long period of time, we do our best to interpret it as the mid-19th century, which is sort of a broad way of interpreting.

We are the benefits of both family heirlooms, though.

So both families' archival materials, the artifacts that come from both families, which makes it a really fantastic body of artifactual material in which we can interpret.

As you walk into the Wylie House, you are first struck by the fact that it has some grandeur about it.

There's a mural painted on the wall.

It's a contemporary mural, painted by an artist named John Tom in 2009.

It was an interpretive decision made by the former director to help tell the story of the -- of the Wylies, but also the area.

And that mural is all done in a style of a 19th century mural artist named Lucas Porter.

So the parlor in the Wylie House Museum would have been used to welcome guests.

So there were -- the Wylies were a really social family.

Part of that was because they had a piano.

Only one of two pianos in Bloomington at the time, which was really quite interesting and drew singing groups here.

So the main bedroom at Wylie House can be surprising to guests.

It's right off the parlor.

Two big double doors open up into the main bedroom.

A lot of furniture in the 19th century was on little wheels called casters.

So you could move the furniture around, move the bed even out of the way, and rearrange furniture to make space for different uses.

The kitchen in homes in the 19th century were often at the back home or the far end of the home, depending on the layout of the house.

In part, that was to hide the domestic activity.

Another part of that was to have that kitchen farther from the main body of the house, was a layer of safety and security in the event of fires.

So Wylie House has a porch on the roof.

Those are referred to as widow's walks, and those are extremely uncommon in the Midwest.

They really hail from the East Coast.

President Wylie would have been able to use it for his interest in astronomy.

He also would have been able to survey his large farm.

He could see down to campus from here and also see into downtown, into the courthouse.

Research at Wylie House is really ongoing.

For a small space, there's a lot to share, a lot to understand, and a lot to interpret.

So beyond the stories related to the individuals who lived here, the stories of Indiana University history, Bloomington history, Indiana history, and mid-19th century history for the U.S. are all relevant.

So we're -- we really try to meet the needs and interests of a wide variety of people.

♪ >> BRANDON: I think one of the most fascinating things about this place is as you go from room to room, seeing the color schemes.

It's so much more bright and vibrant than I would have expected for the time period.

So it's very cool to get to see that recreated and being able to step inside of it and experience it.

Want to learn more?

Just head to the address on your screen.

Up next, producer Saddam Abbas takes us to Monroe County to meet an artist who found harmony in glassblowing.

♪ >> Art is a way to be expressive.

It's tough.

It can mean two different things.

Being an artist, it just depends on your perspective, but it definitely means, you know, a show of creativity of the mind, and that we are all blessed with an ability to create.

And once you've got enough practice at it and if enough people like it and you can put it in front of enough people, then art can also be, you know, a way of life then at that point.

So that's what art is.

♪ >> Every idea is a new idea.

So that's why it becomes like a favorite.

So when I'm listening to music, every song has a reason to be kind of a favorite song.

I've been playing bass guitar now for about 25 years.

I had an idea to make guitar knobs, like for the control portion of a guitar, and I wanted to make those out of glass.

I had never seen anybody make those out of glass before.

It started as a hobby, but it grew into something more, one step at a time.

I was a welder in Arizona.

And in Arizona, in Tucson where I lived, there's welding shops everywhere that you could get supplies from.

And then when I moved back here to Indiana, where I'm from -- I'm from Bloomington, there's no welding shops.

You have to go up to Indianapolis to get supplies for welding.

And so my friend who suggested that I buy a glass torch also informed me that Bloomington has one of, like, the top warehouses for glassblowing stuff in the country.

I became a glassblower out of convenience.

♪ When I make a marble, the beginning of a marble actually starts as a cup, and then the cup is where I put all the glass inside.

And then melt it down.

All the active heating will happen here on the torch.

I consider this to be, like, the beginning of one of the marbles.

It's all solid and ready to go.

These are pieces that I make.

Then I will take them, and I will heat them up in different bands and twist them back and forth to make a zigzag pattern.

And then that gets, you know, squished up in the mold there, and you can smooth it and turn it.

And when you do it enough, like it will be, like, perfectly round.

And then there's a little trick to get it off the handle there.

And then there's a little trick to polish it.

After you do that, that would make like a really neat looking marble.

I had never seen anybody put sparkles in a marble like this.

And so this has every element that I've wanted in a marble.

It gives me depth.

It gives me sparkles, and it gives me, like, straight lines.

Making something like this and then making it a marble, like, that just checks all the boxes for me.

Like, it just felt like this was the way that I wanted to make 'em for sure, because it was, like, I love everything about the style.

♪ Everywhere, anywhere, anything could be inspiration.

Colors like -- any color combination that I haven't seen lately, any color combination that I haven't seen ever.

The actual artistic process, it actually begins with the previous marble a lot of times.

The glass, the colors of the glass, I have to get all different types of colors of glass.

They all change color with the way that they are heated, okay?

So if you heat up a piece of red, for instance, it will turn brown.

If I have those colors together, sometimes I see them in different colors than what they really are.

And when I see their hot colors, sometimes the hot colors will definitely give me an idea for another set of colors that I would like to try on a marble.

My two aspects that are the strongest in glass are my marble making and my turtle making.

It's kind of odd.

I was asked to make a sea turtle pendant one time.

It was a very good friend of mine, and so I did it.

And ever since I made one, I just wanted to make one better and better and better and better.

So I just got hung up on the sea turtle pendants because I'm a perfectionist.

♪ When I'm making a marble, it is sort of figuratively and literally, in a way, my own little world.

When I bend it back and forth and smoosh it together, it's like, you know, you make a round little thing that could be like a world, right?

But when -- when you look inside of it, the way that they wave back and forth, I think of them as landscapes when I'm making them.

So, like, in a way, they are their own worlds, like -- it's like a picture of a fantasy world that doesn't exist.

>> BRANDON: This story makes me think of -- you know, he talks about the idea of each marble being its own little world.

I have a marble that sits on my desk that looking at it, it is if you took Van Gogh's "Starry Night" and put it into a marble.

And it is one of the most stunning and random and beautiful things.

So having the opportunity to have a piece made by him, what more could you want from a marble?

Want to learn more?

Just head to the address on your screen.

Up next, producer Adam Carroll takes us to Bartholomew County to get the lay of the land with the artist duo known as haptiK ¦B.

♪ >> Jeeyea Kim grew up in Seoul, Korea, a big city that helped inspire her career in architecture and design.

Dorian Bybee grew up in the Midwest, equally inspired by his surroundings, he pursued a similar path.

Together, they formed the design firm haptiK ¦B, to bring all of their inspirations to life.

>> We worked in just about every kind of team environment you can imagine.

So by the time we started working together on our own work, we had kind of seen the gamut of different opportunities and ways you can work.

And we actually don't focus on one way.

We kind of are reactive.

We have to deal with what the project presents us, and then we just kind of make our best -- do the best we can with what we are presented.

>> Yes, it's like trained as architects, we always educated to be team collaborators.

We are kind of accustomed to share the thoughts and brainstorm together and revise together.

So we are -- we think it's a great team.

You know, there are some things that I could not do as much as he could do.

So we kind of balance out our work together.

When we have a project to start with, we think about the concept first.

You know, ideation.

We always start with the brainstorming, conceptualizing.

We are heavily using digital modeling, digital working, any kind of method.

So sometimes we kind of split, you know, those works.

But most of the time, we kind of back and forth between collaborative thoughts, ideation, and back to revision and back and forth.

>> It's interesting because there's good and bad side when we come together.

Sometimes we start to come up with the same idea, and then it's like, oh, that means it's a good idea.

Or sometimes, like, wait, if we both have that idea, maybe we should find some other opportunity there.

It's not just a collaboration between ourselves.

It's actually -- there also a degree of collaboration literally in the project we're working on currently, but a little more figuratively other times between our kind of professional work and academic work.

Because there's so much that you learn through teaching.

>> The pair's latest project, one that finds them working in Bartholomew County as part of the Exhibit Columbus program, brings together their academic interests and their professional pursuits.

LaWaSo Ground combines renderings of land, soil, and water to tell the story of the Midwest's Indigenous cultures, and to advocate for their increased inclusion.

The key element, Indiana limestone.

>> So we have been calling it LaWaSo Ground, which is a communal ground for those three elements, which is connected to those material cultures.

Again, land we are calling it through this land of limestone, or the limestone deposit that is embedded into the land.

People who started excavating to really bring the nation, you know, the whole nation of America for 200 years.

They utilized the material.

More than 80% of all limestone production over this small, narrow band of deep stone deposit has been used a lot for building the nation.

So we have been kind of conceptualizing the material as kind of symbolically or referring to American colonial culture.

And then the other one, soil, we are thinking of going really past to these Native Americans, Indians culture of making this land form, that it's mimicking land of, like, rolling hills.

So we kind of tried to synthesize these two different polemic ideas of land and soil, putting together into one site.

>> Those three elements are separate, but they're all very related.

There's a system involved, and one can become the other, or at least there's a very intimate kind of relationship between them.

In that same sense, as we looked at the cultures and the histories involved, we found a way that hopefully we can express the relationships between things, allowing them to be unique and separate, but not having to be separated.

Stone, along with wood and some other materials, are considered primitive in the sense that human beings have been using them pretty much forever.

In the case of Indiana limestone, the reason it's been utilized around the country is because it's this nice blend between hard and soft.

So it's hard enough to be durable.

It lasts quite a while.

It's soft enough to be able to put a really fine detail into it.

The stone gives us an opportunity to connect to the community and the history involved.

♪ >> For this duo, connection is key.

Jeeyea and Dorian have worked all over the world, from Beijing to Portugal to New York, but a recent project allowed the pair to work a little closer to home.

>> One that was working very well was the bicentennial medal that we designed a couple of years ago for -- to celebrate the bicentennial history of Indiana University.

For that project, it was -- it was different process because it was a medal, you know and that it's metal, you know.

As an architect, we really understand things more spatially, and then looking at the maps and the location, kind of showing the physical connectivity of all those IU-related campuses, including medical and academic campuses in Indiana.

So we wanted to show the interconnectiveness of those campuses in kind of three-dimensional mapping and how they are located and how they are connected through the arcs and how they are trajectory out towards the nation and globally.

>> The future for Jeeyea and Dorian lies at the intersection between cutting-edge digital fabrication and classic materials, like Indiana limestone.

There, they hope to find a middle ground between design and culture, and bring a global focus to local work.

>> As we move forward, we are really interested in occupying that space between these different kinds of elements and finding those kinds of potentials that exist where, to a certain extent, people have gravitated to one end or the other.

You know, we are kind of looking -- we're exploring the new middles, the old middles.

>> Yes.

>> The in between spaces.

♪ >> BRANDON: Want to learn more?

Head to the address on your screen.

And as always, we'd like to encourage you to stay connected with us.

Just head over to JourneyIndiana.org.

There you can see full episodes, connect with us on Facebook, YouTube and Instagram and suggest stories from your neck of the woods.

We also have a map future that allows you to see where we've been and to plan your own Indiana adventures.

Well, I realize it's a little too light out for any stargazing, but I think I'm gonna head up to the widow's walk anyway and see what kind of view there is during the daylight hours.

We'll see you next time on "Journey Indiana."

♪ ♪ >> Production support for "Journey Indiana" is provided by WTIU members.

Thank you!