Louisville Magazine

MAY 2012

Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.

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German Insurance Bank Building, 207 W. Market St. "First of all, I should say that it was designed by my wife's great-grandpa, Charles D. Meyer, a German-trained architect, and was completed in 1887. (It now houses Godsey Associates Architects.) It's one of Louisville preservation's great success stories, because it was going to be demolished for an office tower and the community rallied around it. A lot of this façade was inspired by European architecture — the classical elements, the columns — but here it's moving in a much more modern, abstracted direction. My master's thesis at the University of Delaware was on a style of decoration called the Neo- Grec, or New Greek — taking three-dimensional rounded elements and flattening them severely, like a slice from a loaf of bread. When you look at the loaf, it's got this roundedness, but when you cut it you have a rounded top but straight sides. Tat's exactly what you see here. Rather than these columns being full, Meyer cut the sides off them. And that was seen in 1887 as very, very modern. And see the calla lilies on either side of the date? Te building is filled with plant forms, no animal masks." Ford Motor Co. Plant, 1400 Southwestern Pkwy. "Both the old Ford plant (now the Reynolds Lofts, across Tird Street from the University of Louisville) and this one, completed in 1925, were the work of Alfred Kahn, probably the premier industrial architect of the first half of the 20th century. For the first time, everything took place within this building: Te raw materials came in by train and the finished vehicles were shipped out by train. In fact, there was a showroom here; you could come in and buy a car. Kahn was not oblivious to decoration and took great delight in embellishing this building with these really rich geometric patterns in the brickwork, including a very prominent wheel motif. You'll notice there is a cornice; if you look closely, it does angle out slightly. Kahn's done that by corbeling those bricks out, which you see in 19th-century buildings. Now look at the pilasters. Tis is what happens to columns as we move deeper into the 20th century; they become flat." 5.12 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE [63]

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