Kaden Tower

KadenTower is a 15-story office building at 6100 Dutchmans Lane in suburban Louisville, Kentucky. The building opened in 1966 as the headquarters for Lincoln Income Life Insurance Company and was originally named Lincoln Tower. Designed by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, the building is notable for its cantilevered structure and its suspended lacework facade. A single-story building on the same site and in the same architectural style adjoins the tower. This smaller building which originally housed a branch office of Liberty National Bank and Trust Company is now leased by WBKI-TV.

Both buildings' designs are often attributed to Frank Lloyd Wright, but they were actually designed by Wright's protégé and son-in-law William Wesley Peters. Wright's widow, Olgivanna Lloyd Wright, is also cited as an influence. Peters became the head of Wright's architectural firm Taliesin Associates after Wright's death in 1959.

Though Peters had his own style, he collaborated with Wright for more than twenty years. He based the design of the Louisville complex largely on three of Wright's projects, only one of which was actually built. Like the Kaden Tower, Wright's never-constructed 1946 sketches for the Sarabhai Calico Mills Store in Ahmedabad, India, had grillwork over the outside windows, a feature that evokes the jali of traditional Mughal architecture. This feature served the dual role of reducing interior solar heat gain while preserving views from interior to exterior (though traditionally jalis also permitted ventilation). Even though Louisville's humid sub-tropical climate has much lower temperatures throughout the year than Ahmedabad's hot semi-arid climate, the exterior cladding still functions as a solar shading device. Peters' design is also evocative of another unbuilt Wright plan, the 40-story Rogers Lacy Hotel. This striking, innovative skyscraper had been commissioned also in 1946 for downtown Dallas, Texas, by oil tycoon Rogers Lacy but was never built due to his untimely death.

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