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27-459: Renovations began in January 2013 and the museum opened on March 1, 2014. The restoration restored the building to pre-Civil War condition along with a 1900s-era cast-iron spiral staircase. New bathrooms and prep kitchen were added. The museum collections include Louisville Water's historic photographs, films and memorabilia, as well as architectural drawings, water main sections, meters and tools, and

54-441: A handrail , coping , or ornamental detail is known as a balustrade . The term baluster shaft is used to describe forms such as a candlestick, upright furniture support, and the stem of a brass chandelier. The term banister (also bannister) refers to a baluster or to the system of balusters and handrail of a stairway. It may be used to include its supporting structures, such as a supporting newel post. According to

81-482: A development of the 18th century in Great Britain (see Coade stone ), and cast iron balusters a development largely of the 1840s. As balusters and balustrades have evolved, they can now be made from various materials with a few popular choices being timber, glass and stainless steel. The baluster, being a turned structure , tends to follow design precedents that were set in woodworking and ceramic practices, where

108-448: A girl in a bonnet . Balustrade A baluster ( / ˈ b æ l ə s t ər / ) is an upright support, often a vertical moulded shaft, square, or lathe -turned form found in stairways , parapets , and other architectural features. In furniture construction it is known as a spindle . Common materials used in its construction are wood, stone, and less frequently metal and ceramic. A group of balusters supporting

135-537: A steam mud pump. The exhibit topics include riverbank filtration, clean drinking water, the use of mules in reservoir cleaning, steam engines, architecture and engineering innovations. The museum is located on the same site as the Louisville Water Tower in the area known as Louisville Water Tower Park. 38°16′50.9″N 85°42′04.7″W  /  38.280806°N 85.701306°W  / 38.280806; -85.701306 This Louisville -related article

162-475: A wood-paneled shaft, but after the tornado destroyed it, it was replaced with cast iron . The tornado also destroyed all but two of the ten statues that were on the pedestals. Shortly thereafter, a new pumping station and reservoirs were built in Crescent Hill , and the original water tower ceased pumping operations in 1909. The pumping station was renovated in 2010. In January 2013, extensive renovations of

189-445: Is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Louisville Water Tower The Louisville Water Tower , located east of downtown Louisville, Kentucky , near the riverfront, is the oldest ornamental water tower in the world, having been built before the more famous Chicago Water Tower . Both the actual water tower and its pumping station are a designated National Historic Landmark for their architecture. As with

216-532: The Oxford English Dictionary , "baluster" is derived through the French : balustre , from Italian : balaustro , from balaustra , "pomegranate flower" [from a resemblance to the swelling form of the half-open flower ( illustration, below right )], from Latin balaustrium , from Greek βαλαύστριον ( balaustrion ). The earliest examples of balusters are those shown in the bas-reliefs representing

243-610: The Assyrian palaces, where they were employed as functional window balustrades and apparently had Ionic capitals. As an architectural element alone the balustrade did not seem to have been known to either the Greeks or the Romans , but baluster forms are familiar in the legs of chairs and tables represented in Roman bas-reliefs, where the original legs or the models for cast bronze ones were shaped on

270-549: The Fairmount Water Works of Philadelphia (designed 1812, built 1819–22), the industrial nature of its pumping station was disguised in the form of a Roman temple complex. In 2014, the Louisville WaterWorks Museum opened on the premises. Unknown to residents at the time, the lack of a safe water supply presented a significant health risk to the city. After the arrival of the second cholera pandemic in

297-500: The Red Fort of Agra and Delhi , in the early seventeenth century. Foliate baluster columns with naturalistic foliate capitals, unexampled in previous Indo-Islamic architecture according to Ebba Koch , rapidly became one of the most widely used forms of supporting shaft in Northern and Central India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The modern term baluster shaft is applied to

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324-474: The coal necessary to operate the station. The main column, of the Doric order , rises 183 feet (55.8 m) out of a Corinthian portico surrounding its base. The portico is surmounted by a wooden balustrade with ten pedestals also constructed of wood, originally supporting painted cast-zinc statues from J. W. Fiske & Company , ornamental cast-iron manufacturers of New York. Even the reservoir's gatehouse on

351-506: The turner's lathe and the potter's wheel are ancient tools. The profile a baluster takes is often diagnostic of a particular style of architecture or furniture, and may offer a rough guide to date of a design, though not of a particular example. Some complicated Mannerist baluster forms can be read as a vase set upon another vase. The high shoulders and bold, rhythmic shapes of the Baroque vase and baluster forms are distinctly different from

378-509: The 16th century. Wittkower distinguished two types, one symmetrical in profile that inverted one bulbous vase-shape over another, separating them with a cushionlike torus or a concave ring, and the other a simple vase shape, whose employment by Michelangelo at the Campidoglio steps ( c 1546), noted by Wittkower, was preceded by very early vasiform balusters in a balustrade round the drum of Santa Maria delle Grazie ( c 1482), and railings in

405-517: The United States (1832), Louisville in the 1830s and 40s gained the nickname "graveyard of the west", due to the polluted local water giving Louisville residents cholera and typhoid at epidemic levels. This was because residents used the water of tainted private wells, but the linkage was not discovered until 1854 by the English physician John Snow , and not accepted as fact until decades later. Due to

432-674: The cathedrals of Aquileia ( c 1495) and Parma , in the cortile of San Damaso, Vatican, and Antonio da Sangallo 's crowning balustrade on the Santa Casa at Loreto installed in 1535, and liberally in his model for the Basilica of Saint Peter . Because of its low center of gravity , this "vase-baluster" may be given the modern term "dropped baluster". Balusters may be made of carved stone , cast stone , plaster , polymer , polyurethane / polystyrene , polyvinyl chloride (PVC), precast concrete , wood , or wrought iron . Cast-stone balusters were

459-506: The failure of a first attempt to secure voter approval to buy shares, the project was widely promoted. In 1856 voters approved purchase of 5500 shares in 1856, and another 2200 shares in 1859, transforming it into an almost completely government-owned corporation . The inspiration for the architecture of Louisville's Water Tower came from the French architect Claude Nicolas Ledoux , who merged "architectural beauty with industrial efficiency". It

486-451: The inventor of the baluster and credited Giuliano da Sangallo with using it consistently as early as the balustrade on the terrace and stairs at the Medici villa at Poggio a Caiano ( c 1480), and used balustrades in his reconstructions of antique structures. Sangallo passed the motif to Bramante (his Tempietto , 1502) and Michelangelo , through whom balustrades gained wide currency in

513-624: The lathe, or in Antique marble candelabra, formed as a series of stacked bulbous and disc-shaped elements, both kinds of sources familiar to Quattrocento designers. The application to architecture was a feature of the early Renaissance architecture : late fifteenth-century examples are found in the balconies of palaces at Venice and Verona . These quattrocento balustrades are likely to be following yet-unidentified Gothic precedents . They form balustrades of colonettes as an alternative to miniature arcading. Rudolf Wittkower withheld judgement as to

540-537: The riverfront invoked the castles along the Rhine . The water tower began operations on October 16, 1860. The tower was not just pretty; it was effective. In 24 hours the station could produce 12 million US gallons (45,000 m ) of water. This water, in turn, flowed through 26 miles (42 km) of pipe. A tornado on March 27, 1890 irreparably changed the Water Tower. The original water tower had an iron pipe protected by

567-614: The shaft dividing a window in Saxon architecture. In the south transept of the Abbey in St Albans , England, are some of these shafts, supposed to have been taken from the old Saxon church. Norman bases and capitals have been added, together with plain cylindrical Norman shafts. Balusters are normally separated by at least the same measurement as the size of the square bottom section. Placing balusters too far apart diminishes their aesthetic appeal, and

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594-636: The sixteenth through the seventeenth centuries. Modern baluster design is also in use for example in designs influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement in a 1905 row of houses in Etchingham Park Road Finchley London England. Outside Europe, the baluster column appeared as a new motif in Mughal architecture , introduced in Shah Jahan 's interventions in two of the three great fortress-palaces,

621-691: The sober baluster forms of Neoclassicism , which look to other precedents, like Greek amphoras . The distinctive twist-turned designs of balusters in oak and walnut English and Dutch seventeenth-century furniture, which took as their prototype the Solomonic column that was given prominence by Bernini , fell out of style after the 1710s. Once it had been taken from the lathe, a turned wood baluster could be split and applied to an architectural surface, or to one in which architectonic themes were more freely treated, as on cabinets made in Italy, Spain and Northern Europe from

648-437: The structural integrity of the balustrade they form. Balustrades normally terminate in heavy newel posts, columns, and building walls for structural support. Balusters may be formed in several ways. Wood and stone can be shaped on the lathe, wood can be cut from square or rectangular section boards, while concrete, plaster, iron, and plastics are usually formed by molding and casting. Turned patterns or old examples are used for

675-537: The water project's completion in 1866, Louisville was free of cholera during the epidemic of 1873. After several devastating fires in the 1850s, Louisvillians were convinced of the importance of the project. The decision was made by the Kentucky Legislature to form the Louisville Water Company on March 6, 1854. Private investors showed little interest and so after only 55 shares had been sold and

702-427: The water tower property, including the addition of the Louisville WaterWorks Museum , began, and the museum opened on March 1, 2014. There are ten zinc statues above the first level's balustrade , each standing on a pedestal over a Corinthian column . They are listed clockwise below with identifiable features: The statues were originally urns in the plans. The first set of statues included Ceres , Diana , and

729-453: Was decided to render the water station an ornament to the city, to make skeptical Louisvillians more accepting of a water company. Theodore Scowden and his assistant Charles Hermany were the architects of the structures. They chose an area just outside town, on a hill overlooking the Ohio River , which provided excellent elevation. The location also meant that coal boats could easily deliver

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