A 26-story postmodernist tower in downtown Louisville, Kentucky, designed by Michael Graves as the headquarters of the Humana Corporation, is slated to become a 1,000-room convention hotel. The $600 million to $700 million project, developed by Louisville-based Poe Companies and to be renovated by HKS, would make it the city’s second-largest hotel behind the Galt House’s 1,310 rooms.

In a recent city address Mayor Craig Greenberg called it a “world-class” development that “will bring more people to Louisville every day, create hundreds of local jobs, and help us attract more and larger events.”

Renderings show a new glass tower rising just south of the original headquarters, with a 40,000-square-foot ballroom, meeting space, and a rooftop pool. Construction could begin next year, with opening set three to four years out, according to Poe Companies president Hank Hillebrand.

The Humana Building isn’t a typical corporate headquarters; its ground floor is a loggia—an open colonnade framed by heavy granite piers, with a waterfall fountain referencing the Falls of the Ohio just downstream. The 6-story base matches the scale of the 19th-century commercial buildings along Main Street’s historic corridor, pulled forward from the tower like a handshake extended to the older city.

Graves chose granite, marble, and bronze over the steel and glass that defined corporate construction at the time. Above the base, the tower steps back through shifts in massing and material, its facade projecting and receding. Locally it’s known as the “milk carton” because of the slanted shape prominent on its upper floors.

At the crown, a curved observation deck cantilevers outward, supported by a steel truss that mirrors the bridges spanning the Ohio River to the north. Inside, Graves gave the best window in the building—a wide, south-facing bay—to an employee lounge, while the executive suite sat on the fifth and sixth floors. The Society of Architectural Historians called it “a successful demonstration of how architecture after modernism can enliven urban space through color, contextualism, and metaphorical references to the larger environment”. Time listed it among the best buildings of the 1980s.

The building was the product of a particular moment. In 1982, Humana’s cofounders David Jones and Wendell Cherry held an invited competition for a headquarters that would bridge Louisville’s past and its future. Postmodernism had spent a decade pushing back against modernism’s austerity—its stripped surfaces, its indifference to place—and Graves’s entry beat proposals from Norman Foster and César Pelli, whose work represented exactly the glass-tower typology the movement was reacting against. “Its architectural character and response to context became a new urban paradigm,” Graves’s firm later wrote. Graves himself was pivoting. A member of the New York Five whose early work was steeped in modernist abstraction, he had turned by the late 1970s toward a richer, more referential architecture; the Humana Building, completed three years after his Portland Building in Oregon, confirmed the shift.

The company that commissioned the building did not stay. Humana announced in early 2024 that it would vacate the tower, consolidating at its nearby Waterside-Clocktower campus amid the rise of remote work. The 525,000-square-foot building was fully emptied last year. Humana had also filed a lawsuit in 2023 against Michael Graves & Associates and others over structural defects discovered after completion.

Now the tower gets a second life—but on very different terms. Developers say the project will preserve the building’s architectural legacy. The observation deck on the 25th floor, Graves’s rooftop porch overlooking the river, is now envisioned as a premium event venue; historic buildings along Main Street will be incorporated for food and beverage programming.

Not everyone thinks it should be repurposed as hospitality. Louisville residents responding to polls from local outlet LouToday suggested mixed-income housing and a technology high school instead, a tension sharpened by the fact that Graves spent his last decade designing not for convention guests but for people who needed better wheelchairs.

The Humana Building has no landmark protection. Robert A. M. Stern included it on a list of 15 postmodern buildings deserving of landmark status in the February 2024 Architectural Record; its near-contemporary, the Portland Building, barely escaped demolition before Portland opted for expensive reconstruction. Postmodern buildings are entering the era when someone has to argue for them. The Humana Building was never neutral. It chose granite over glass, the street over the plaza, the many over the few. That it is about to sit next to a glass tower built in its name is either a conversation across eras or an irony Graves would have appreciated. For now, the pink granite still catches the light.