Buffalo Waterfront - Table of Contents

Grain Elevators

On Buffalo Architecture & History:

Grain Elevator Dictionary

3 drawings illustrating how grain elevators work

Buffalo Industrial Heritage Trail

The Slip Form Method and Reinforced Concrete Grain Elevators

Buffalo's Demolished Grain Elevators

Silo City

Buffalo Grain Elevator "Preserve" 

Joseph Dart

Dale Butler, Alfred Edward Baxter and the Grain Industry

Lynn Freehill-Maye, The Trouble With Owning a Grain Elevator

Francis R. Kowsky,  Monuments of a Vanished Prosperity: Buffalo's Grain Elevators and the Rise and Fall of the Great Transnational System of Grain Transportation  History of Buffalo's Grain Elevators

Tim Tielman,  Buffalo's Unusual Claim to Architectural Fame

Timothy Tielman,  Buffalo's Waterfront: A Guidebook Sample pages from the book

Ramona Pando Whitaker, Attitude Is Everything: Cylinders and Pyramids

1841, 1894, 1910, 1960

Buffalo Listings - Historic American Buildings (HABS) Survey

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On other websites:

Henry H. Baxter, Adventures in American History Series: Grain Elevators  (online April 2013)

Nicholas Howe, Across an Inland Sea: Writing in Place from Buffalo to Berlin E-text  (online April 2013)

Francis R. Kowsky, Historic and Architectural Resources of the Buffalo Grain and Materials Elevator Multiple Property Submission  (online April 2013)

Mark Maio, Against the Grain Illustrations and info   (online April 2013)

Reconsidering Concrete Atlantis:  Buffalo Grain Elevators   (online April 2013)

HABS: Buffalo Grain Elevators 107 data pages   (online April 2013)

EPA, 9.9.1 Grain Elevators And Processes (online June 2013)

The Industrial Heritage Trail The Industrial Heritage Committee, Inc.  (online April 2013)

Grain Elevator Map Buffalo History Works.  (online April 2013)

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The Importance of Grain Elevators 2 excerpts from Reconsidering Concrete Atlantis: Buffalo Grain Elevators  (online Jan. 2013)   As articulated by Reyner Banham in A Concrete Atlantis (1986), the grain elevators in general and those in Buffalo in particular were an inspiration to modern architects in Europe. Le Corbusier declared, “Thus we have the American grain elevators and factories, the magnificent FIRST FRUITS of the new age ..." It was the power of the visual image that moved these architects, and the adoption of their formal qualities had a long term effect on modern architecture. The simple but powerful geometric structures and the ideology of practical design without ornamentation conformed to the purposes of modernism. -  Lynda H. Schneekloth, p. 15  (online Jan. 2013) In the 1910s and 1920s, photographs of grain elevators circulated in European architectural publications dedicated to modern architecture, prominent Buffalo examples included. That the functional dictates of grain storage could produce the uncontrived beauty of the platonic cylinder was taken as proof of modernist values. Such industrial buildings, it followed, were at least as modern as any contemporary architecture with masterly authors, such as Louis Sullivan or Frank Lloyd Wright. On the authority of these images, avant-garde European architects began to design non-industrial buildings that resembled an American industrial type that they had never physically experienced .... A Concrete Atlantis [by Reyner Banham, 1986] made the claim that the quintessence of European modernism was rooted in two types of American industrial buildings, the daylight factory and the grain elevator .... The association of elevators with pure form appears to have entered modernist consciousness via Wilhelm Worringer’s comparison of contemporary silos to the monuments of ancient Egyptians in his celebrated text, Abstraction and Empathy (1908). In addition to the fact that the concrete silos bore an uncanny likeness to the massive columns of New Kingdom temples, ancient Egypt was associated with the history of grain storage through the biblical story of Joseph stockpiling grain for the seven years of famine, as well as the myth that the pyramids functioned as silos. In 1913, Gropius’ [Water Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus School]  conclusion that America -- rather than Germany -- was the ‘Industrial Motherland’ would have come as a surprise the industrialists, artists, and architects to whom the manifesto was most immediately addressed. -  Hadas Steiner, pp. 106-107 (online Jan. 2013)

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