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The Central Kentucky and Tennessee region's architecture features everything from palatial plantation homes to a Parthenon!
Historic and Plantation Homes in Central Kentucky
- One of central Kentucky's finest examples of late-18th-century architecture is Louisville's Locust Grove. Built in 1790, the Georgian-style mansion, with its Flemish brickwork and beautifully-finished ash floors, was the home of revolutionary war hero General George Rogers Clark (the founder of Louisville). That's not all: Presidents Monroe, Jackson, and Taylor spent time here, as did the well-known explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. You can learn more about the Locust Grove's laudable history with a tour of the home and its historic artifacts. The site includes the mansion, a smoke house, and eight other stone and log farm buildings.
- In 1909, the seventh owner of Whitehall (in Louisville), Mr. John Middleton, transformed the original 1855 house into a 15-room Classic Revival-style mansion. Today, the restored estate, with period furnishings, sits on 10 beautiful acres, including a formal Florentine garden.
- A beautiful Palladian window greets visitors to the historic Hunt-Morgan House near Gratz Park, in Lexington. Built in 1814 by John Wesley Hunt, one of Lexington's most highly-regarded citizens and reputedly the first millionaire west of the Alleghenies, the elegant Federal-style house has been exquisitely renovated with period furnishings and design.
- Exemplifying the typically opulent antebellum-style architecture (antebellum means “before war,” in this case the Civil War), complete with balconies, columns, pillars and the like, Lexington's Ashland (Kentucky statesman Henry Clay's mansion) is a lovingly-restored, sprawling estate, a portion of which was designed by famed architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe.
Historic and Plantation Homes in Central Tennessee
- Some say a friendly ghost presides over Tennessee's premier Victorian, 10,000-square foot historic mansion, Falcon Rest, in McMinnville. Built in 1896, the estate is beautifully restored, and fun, upbeat tours give a great introduction to the mansion's mythic lore.
- Despite the misleading name, The Hermitage, in Hermitage, Tennessee, is not a monastery or a Russian museum, but rather the historic estate of President Andrew Jackson. The magnificent mansion, rebuilt in Greek Revival-style after an 1834 fire, is completely restored with nearly all of the original furnishings and wallpaper. President Jackson and his First Lady Rachel are buried on the 625-acre grounds.
- Pay your respects to the “Queen of Tennessee Plantations.” Nashville's Belle Meade Plantation, an 1853 Greek Revival-style mansion, is still decked out in its mid-19th-century furnishings. Costumed guides will add a period flair to your perusal of this estate on 30 acres.
- One of the wealthiest ladies in the United States at the time, Adelicia Acklen, contracted the 19,000-square-foot antebellum, Italianate Belmont Mansion in Nashville. Visitors can tour 16 restored rooms as well as elaborately-manicured gardens.
Architectural Highlights in Central Kentucky
Louisville is a bastion of many things, amazing architecture included. Like aged wine, Old Louisville, the largest Victorian district in the U.S., gives the city a more full-bodied flavor. It is a 1,200-acre area south of the central business district, centered on Third, Fourth, Seventh, Magnolia, and Zane Streets near Central Park. Though the vast majority of the homes are privately owned and not open to the public, drive or walk around the area and you'll see fine examples of Victorian Gothic, Italianate, Queen Anne, Richardsonian Romanesque, and Beaux Arts homes (1870s-1900s), as well as the typical, boxy Southern shotgun houses.
Homes built in the shotgun style were generally owned by clerks, plumbers, and traders. Shotgun houses are those in which the front and back doors, as well as all of the rooms in the house, are completely aligned, such that if a shot were fired through the front door (and all the doors were open), it would pass cleanly through the house and into the backyard. To get a good look at several shotgun homes built between 1885 and 1889, head to 1117-1125 S. Sixth Street.
Mason Maury, one of Kentucky's leading architects, was famous for using the Richardsonian Romanesque style, featuring rounded arches around windows and doors as well as towers and turrets. Evidence of his work in Old Louisville can be seen at 1322-1332 S. Fourth Street; residences with stone trimmings, slate roofs, and pressed brick façades, built by Maury in 1887 and considered to be the most beautiful homes at that time.
Another prominent architectural style in Old Louisville is the Italianate villa, usually dating around the late-19th century or early-20th century. Featuring square and rectangular shapes embellished with cornices and square pillared verandas, you can see two fine examples of Old Louisville's Italianate architecture at 610 and 611 Zane Street.
Looking for modern architectural attractions and anomalies in Louisville? The controversial pink Kaden Tower on Dutchman's Lane was designed by William Wesley Peters and Taliesin architects in 1965 using a design that Frank Lloyd Wright had originally intended for a hotel in India. And Time Magazine listed Michael Graves' 27-story postmodern skyscraper, the Humana Building (1982), on South Fifth Street, as one of the 10 Best Buildings of the Decade. Employing expensive materials such as pink granite and gold leaf, Graves used an unconventional design approach mixing post-modern stylistic elements with repetitive, more traditional modern glass and steel architecture. The building features a pyramidal skylight, a dramatic curved roof, and a magnificent waterfall in the entrance.
In addition to taking pains with his own sprawling mansion, Lexington's Ashland, Kentucky statesman Henry Clay wanted the surrounding neighborhood to be aesthetically up-to-par, and thus hired the highly-regarded Olmsted Brothers landscape architecture firm from Brookline, Massachusetts, to develop the 600-acre area. Avoiding right-angled intersections and weaving wide, sprawling green spaces around gently curving streets, the Olmsted Brothers' cutting-edge urban design was finished in 1930, at which time wealthy families bought and built on highly-coveted plots.
Today known as the Ashland Park Historic District, adjacent to the Ashland estate in Lexington, you can walk or drive through the residential neighborhood to see the wide range of architecturally-unique single-family homes, built primarily from 1900-1949. Look for Craftsman, Bungalow, Tudor Revival, Georgian Revival, Dutch Colonial Revival, and Spanish Eclectic designs, among countless others. You will recognize the Craftsman and Bungalow houses in the Ashland Park Historic District by their low-pitched roofs and porches supported by square columns or pedestals. They are generally simple constructions, dating back to the early 20th century. Ashland Park's Georgian Revival homes are generally formal villas, though square or rectangular in shape, their floor plans are often asymmetrical. The façade features cornices and brackets and the roofs are generally low-pitched or flat. The Georgian Revival-style homes in Ashland Park generally date around the turn of the 20th century.
To see something that came off the drafting table of a well-known Kentucky architect, the Old Morrison building located on Transylvania University's campus in Lexington, is a fine choice. The crisp-white, stately building was designed by Gideon Shryock, considered to be the “father of Greek Revival architecture in Kentucky,” and the architect of the Old State Capitol in Frankfort and the Arkansas State Capitol building. Built in 1834, Old Morrison is a National Historic Landmark built in Shyrock's typical Greek Revival style, complete with six large Doric columns.
Architectural Highlights in Central Tennessee
Nashville holds most of central Tennessee's architectural treasures. Downtown you'll see a wide range of buildings from modern skyscrapers to restored, historic buildings. Walk along Broadway and you'll come across the Victorian Gothic Customs House (Nashville's former post office), the “Classic Moderne” Frist Center (duck inside, the art deco interior is what makes this building unique). Union Station, built in 1900, flaunts 67-feet high vaulted ceilings with Tiffany-style windows. The Parthenon, in Centennial Park, is the world's only full-sized replica of the Athens, Greece original. The building of Olympic-proportions features Tennessee marble floors and also sports a 42-foot-high statue of Athena, billed as “the largest indoor sculpture in the Western World.” The Tennessee State Capitol (1859), also in Nashville, is a magnificent Greek Revival-style building built from local Tennessee limestone and marble. On the east lawn you can visit President and Mrs. James K. Polk's burial sites.
For one of Nashville's most beautiful collections of historic buildings, walk around the campus of Vanderbilt University. You will see examples of Romantic architectural influences; curves (and few right angles), uneven roof lines, and textured façades. Many buildings date back to the 1870s and have been on the National Historic Landmark list since 1966, and Vanderbilt's Peabody College of Education and Human Development boasts some of the finest architecture. The Cohen Building (1926), dedicated to Fine Arts education, has an elegant interior with wainscoting, marble columns, balustrade, and marble mosaic floors in the entrance atrium. One of the campus' most dramatic buildings is the Fay and Joe Wyatt Center for Education. The white-domed structure with its 10 Corinthian columns was a gift to Vanderbilt University from John D. Rockefeller in 1915.
Perhaps the most-prized among Chattanooga's architectural gems is the Tivoli Theatre on Broad Street. Open since 1921, the Beaux Arts-style building, with its high-domed ceiling, lavish lobby, crystal chandeliers, and $30,000 Wurlitzer organ (installed in 1924), was built to the tune of close to $1 million - a fortune for the time. Chicago-based architectural firm Rapp and Rapp originally designed Tivoli for silent movies and live stage productions. Today (more than 80 years and $7 million dollars later), the grandiose building, though no longer in the silent movies business, is still a performing arts palace. Chattanooga's Walnut Street Bridge, built in 1890, is the longest pedestrian bridge in the world. To get a feel for its length, use it to cross over the Tennessee River into trendy Frazier Avenue.
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