Elevators and Modern Design

Grain elevators have a place in North American architectural history that most of us likely take for granted. The great French modernist architect Le Corbusier was completely fascinated by them - by their simplicity, honest use of material, and the fact that they were mostly conceived through function. When he first saw them he exclaimed, "The first fruits of the new age!". To him an elevator was the ultimate example in architecture of form following function.

Italian architect Aldo Rossi recently looked at American grain elevators and wrote:

The Great Plains of America are vast ... its villages turned inward as if time had stood still. These people [weren't] seeking America, but escaping Europe, and in [their] first wooden silos [was the] memory of [European] architecture. Over time the silos rose with ever greater assurance and created the landscape of the New World. In abandoning the problem of form they rediscovered architecture.

These grain elevators were built everywhere next to the new railways of the Prairies in the last century. They are the landmarks to our towns just as cathedrals located the towns of Europe.