Eine Plattform für die Wissenschaft: Bauingenieurwesen, Architektur und Urbanistik
Eine Plattform für die Wissenschaft: Bauingenieurwesen, Architektur und Urbanistik
Silo dreams: metamorphoses of the grain elevator
This paper focuses on the figure of the grain silo, a familiar presence in modernist historiography-the monumental concrete structures in North America that were collected by Walter Gropius and then by Le Corbusier, who both claimed to find in them inspiration for a wholly 'new' form of architecture. Rather than follow this line (which culminates in Banham's corrective account of the silos' reality, and their real designers, in A Concrete Atlantis), I will instead concentrate on the particular ideological and political ideas that were embedded in the image of the silo (and the related image of the blast furnace), particularly with the reception of Le Corbusier's ideas in the Soviet Union. Here, the silo was first embraced by the architectural avant-garde, such as Moisei Ginzburg-who, tellingly, used 'American' images of grain silos rather than those nearer to hand of similar structures in St Petersburg-and then became an all-purpose image of industrial modernity as the USSR moved towards its first Five Year Plan. In the propaganda of the plan, the grain silo features frequently, in posters, magazines and films, as an image of an achieved, or achievable, emancipatory modernity, unifying city and country: and as an authoritarian image of sheer power and vastness. Much of this hinges on the contradictory role of the silo as both rural and industrial, monumental and disposable, and also, in aesthetics, both ancient and modern. Wilhelm Worringer's analysis of 'Egyptian Art' compared American grain silos to the structures of Ancient Egypt, as images of an essentially blank-minded, ultra-organised and despotic state. It will be asked whether the image world of the silo under Stalinism created something similar.
Silo dreams: metamorphoses of the grain elevator
This paper focuses on the figure of the grain silo, a familiar presence in modernist historiography-the monumental concrete structures in North America that were collected by Walter Gropius and then by Le Corbusier, who both claimed to find in them inspiration for a wholly 'new' form of architecture. Rather than follow this line (which culminates in Banham's corrective account of the silos' reality, and their real designers, in A Concrete Atlantis), I will instead concentrate on the particular ideological and political ideas that were embedded in the image of the silo (and the related image of the blast furnace), particularly with the reception of Le Corbusier's ideas in the Soviet Union. Here, the silo was first embraced by the architectural avant-garde, such as Moisei Ginzburg-who, tellingly, used 'American' images of grain silos rather than those nearer to hand of similar structures in St Petersburg-and then became an all-purpose image of industrial modernity as the USSR moved towards its first Five Year Plan. In the propaganda of the plan, the grain silo features frequently, in posters, magazines and films, as an image of an achieved, or achievable, emancipatory modernity, unifying city and country: and as an authoritarian image of sheer power and vastness. Much of this hinges on the contradictory role of the silo as both rural and industrial, monumental and disposable, and also, in aesthetics, both ancient and modern. Wilhelm Worringer's analysis of 'Egyptian Art' compared American grain silos to the structures of Ancient Egypt, as images of an essentially blank-minded, ultra-organised and despotic state. It will be asked whether the image world of the silo under Stalinism created something similar.
Silo dreams: metamorphoses of the grain elevator
Hatherley, Owen (Autor:in)
2015
Aufsatz (Zeitschrift)
Englisch
Silo dreams: metamorphoses of the grain elevator
| Taylor & Francis Verlag | 2015
Silo dreams: metamorphoses of the grain elevator
| British Library Online Contents | 2015
| Online Contents | 1997
Engineering Index Backfile | 1954