Pleated Roof. The pleated roof on this building in the 1800 block of English Avenue is distinctive, especially on a street otherwise populated with late 19th and early 20thCentury homes and commercial buildings. Pleated roofs look like they’ve been folded to created peaks and valleys. Like pleated skirts, pleated roofs come in and go out of fashion. Roofs like this were popular in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
This building makes good use of other trendy materials and elements of design that mark it as a mid-century building. Those include concrete posts, the metal grille on the second story, and those yellow panels with stainless steel dividers.
Avriel Shull, a well-known designer/builder who worked from 1952 to 1976 (and the wife of one-time “Indianapolis News” TV columnist, R. K. Shull), won a design award for this building in the 1960s. Shull’s Thornhurst Addition in Carmel is listed on the National Register of Historic Places for its Mid-Century Modern architecture and because it is the work of a master designer/builder, a woman without a degree in architecture who made a design mark on the Indianapolis area before her early death.
