Kaden Tower
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Kaden Tower (whose name is a combination of the owners' names of Karp and Blieden) is a 15-story office building in suburban Louisville, Kentucky. Opened in 1966 as the headquarters for Lincoln Income Life Insurance Company, the building has a central core with floors being suspended from cantilevered beams from that core.
The building's design is often attributed to Frank Lloyd Wright, but it was actually designed by Wright's protegé and son-in-law William Wesley Peters who became the head of Wright's architectural firm Taliesin Associates after Wright's death. The design is based on Wright's preliminary drawings for a hotel in India with the grillwork over the outside windows meant to decrease interior heat from sunlight. The design was also meant to give the impression of a Japanese lantern at night with inside lighting illuminating the grillwork, but this effect was lost with its evolution from a nighttime use as a hotel to its eventual daytime use as an office building (although interior lighting was illuminated with seasonal symbols on its windows during the month of December during the 1970s and early 1980s). Other than the cantilevered design, another notable feature of the building is that the elevator system is on the building's exterior and primarily consists of glass.
A Ruth's Chris Steak House is located on the top floor, the lower floors are all office space.
