Mixed-Use Hotel & Culture

The prescription for reviving downtown American cities, everyone seems to agree these days, is culture. And so as developers rely increasingly on creating mixed-use districts, it’s perhaps not surprising that some are developing mixed-use buildings. The 21C hotel in downtown Louisville, KY is the latest attempt at a sized-down cultural destination.

The 21C, designed by Deborah Berke Architects for philanthropists Steve Wilson and Laura Lee Brown, is a hotel-museum-restaurant amalgam in a renovated 5-building former warehouse complex. The art hotel—or museum with beds—is a single, dense cultural site devoted to both leisure and function.

What separates this building from other leisure ventures is the conscious integration of culture into all of its physical spaces. The hotel displays contemporary art pieces within guest rooms and hallways, as well as in stand-alone gallery spaces. Guests (paying guests, that is) don’t have to wander far from their living space to experience a cultural attraction; they see it before they’ve brushed their teeth. Wilson and Brown hired Deborah Berke Architects, known for their deft use of minimalist design, to accentuate the experience of viewing contemporary art. Berke faced the challenge of renovating the old warehouses while retaining part of their historic character. The façade of the original building remains, but the architects removed a large chunk of the middle to create an atrium accessible to interior hotel rooms. The union of the old and the new structures is a subtle reminder that boundaries of urban space—whether physical or experiential— are open to negotiation. Berke was positive about the synthesis of functions in 21C, and its ability to appeal to visitors. “[The] vision,” she recalls, “was that there be culture, there be food, there be destination.” The 21C encompasses all these activities, and suggests that the project of keeping disparate downtown experiences discreet may be expendable. Indeed, cities keen to create attractive cultural districts will no doubt continue to experiment with this hyper-mixed-use model.