Thursday, October 12, 2006 | Permalink
Some photos of concrete grain elevators taken from the Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record (HABS/HAER) in the Library of Congress. Enter “grain elevator” in the search field to see more.
There's something about grain elevators that lend themselves easily to adaptive re-use. If we were to hear that some have been turned into urban lofts and offices, or even into a Midwestern palatial homestead for a Hollywood mogul who has grown tired of Montana ranches, we wouldn't be surprised.
If we see them converted into megachurches, we wouldn't be surprised as well. For anyone who has ever driven by a rural town, a grain elevator appears like a cathedral, rising above the Great Plains, imposing and majestic.
And to hearing one recycled into a cultural center and public open space, we'd say that it's probably symptomatic of the current vogue in the industrial sublime. We would then wait for someone to fill the gutted, cavernous interior of a silo-turned-museum with another, though smaller, grain elevator as his commissioned art installation.
Etc.
Another peculiar thing about these buildings is how they can play multiple symbolic roles. They are industrial objects, for sure, but they are also intimately connected to the land and to the cycle of nature. Able to evoke the romantic rural life as well the gritty realities of contemporary urban living, they wouldn't look out of place in a John Ford or an Elia Kazan movie.
For anonymous government bureaucrats, they must seem like potent propaganda tools, a uniquely American object signifying economic vitality and national progress. To see one is to see a future full of promise. It would not surprise us to see them in a New Deal-era documentary or in any one of the political ads presently proliferating exponentially before next month's U.S. mid-term elections.
On the hands of an auteur, however, they will be used to set the mood for a nice Kubrickian dystopian epic. Or maybe Gattaca II.
Finally, they may be pure, simple, strikingly graceful on the outside, but these interior shots tell a different story.
Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record (HABS/HAER)
Grain Elevators by Lisa Mahar-Keplinger
Labels: adaptive reuse, agriculture, archives
Thanks, cp!
Image available at http://www.emporis.com/en/wm/bu/?id=205334
(See previous comment.)
Le Corbusier was quite disturbed by the complete functionality of these structures. It must be taken into context that most of these were constructed by folks who lived through the great depression...
Mark
mark.baker4@gmail.com
Meanwhile, is this the rock-climbing silo in Bloomington that you speak of?
And Anonymous: For one our very first design projects in college, we had to design our dream homes and gardens. To improve our mad formZ skillz, as it were. My dream garden were vast fields of corn, wheat, and soybean. A working landscape. As for the house -- yup, you guessed it -- a converted concrete silo with four circular bins. Painted yellow. So if anything, I may know where your grandfather was coming from when he wanted to live in a silo.
I think of these along with water towers, lighthouses, broadcast antennas, windmills, water dams, etc. Purely functional machine-like buildings that paradoxically have a human dimension which is hard to pin down.
I imagine returning war veterans travelling on the Greyhound along open plains and seeing these and thinking 'Home' - ike something they'd never actually noticed before gets to the core of what it's all about in a silent way.
Coupla refs: you mention auteur movies - i always thought it was strange how more directors havent used the claustrophobic interior of a grain silo as a device a la Peter Weir's 'Witness'. The idea of it being filled up with the equivalent of quicksand 'n drowning in a solid - probably just me on that... :)
Other ref: fascination with these accidental monuments spread thru creative circles around the time pics like these were taken. Charles Sheeler's Ford factory photos spring to mind. And Joseph Stella and Charles Demuth - i could be wrong but I think 'My Egypt' is actually of a grain silo/elevator...
http://www.silophone.net/
Neath
By the way. The tall towering rust buckets next to the elevators are called "joe carts" and they are on a double set of railroad rails to let them move along the elevator. These are interesting and possibly the most dangerous part of concrete central. The staircases have been removed so people don't climb them. I climbed them anyways on the edge of the stairway rails and holding the railings. The joe carts are right next to the river so my cousins and I would climb to different levels to the point of insanity and dive into the river. Dangerous Fun. I would be willing to bet that somebody's gonna die out there before the buildings crumble.
This is Aaron Ormsby, from Buffalo, NY. Peace
-Matthew Key. If you know paintball in buffalo you know me. president of the university at buffalo paintball team. mlkey@buffalo.edu for contact. will be playing at hot shots paintball (genessee st.) this summer as well as concrete. See you on the feild.
-Keyz
http://www.american-colossus.com
http://american-colossus.blogspot.com
http://stoneworksrockgym.com/
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