Reusing Industrial Buildings

http://docomomo-us.org/news/following_function_putting_industrial_buildings_inspired_modernist_movement_back_work?utm_source=Docomomo+revised+mailin...

Marine 'A' Grain Elevator
buffaloah.com

Hello Everyone:

Those of you in the United States, it is (Re) Election Day and if you have not done so, go out and vote.  After you cast your vote, pat yourself on the back for doing your civic duty, pour yourself the beverage of your choice, sit down and read today's post on Modernist inspired industrial building being put back to work.

We love modernist buildings for their radical departure from the tyranny of academic period styles, their innovative use of industrial material, and they way their form follows function.  However, Miriam Kelly in her article, "Following Function: Putting the Industrial Buildings that inspired Modernist Movement Back to Work" for Docomomo-US, points out that the industrial buildings that inspired architects such as Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies Van de Rohe are not quite as celebrated.  In digital age, these buildings face the same challenges as America's former industrial sites.  Ms. Kelly considers three examples featured prominently in Le Corbusier's seminal book Vers une Architecture (1923), taking into account their importance, as understood today and how adaptive reuse can secure their future.

Brooklyn Army Terminal
Cass Gilbert
Michelle Young
untappedcities.com

In the first decades of the twentieth century, European architects viewed American culture as a vehicle for renewing and regenerating their idea of what American was-an agent of modernity and mechanization, unfettered by the anachronistic traditions of Europe, free to create a new aesthetic. Engineers designed a new form and structural identity which resulted in a new vernacular for the industrial period.  Europe, American factories and manufacturing plants were celebrated through photographs set to text by Walter Gropius, Erich Mendelsohn, Bruno Taut, and Le Corbusier in his must-read-by-every-architecture-student book. Images of grain elevators and industrial plants became the foundation for a new dialectical between sculptural form and gridded space.

Aerial view of the Brooklyn Army Terminal
retrosnapshots.com

Le Corbusier used an aerial photograph of the Army Terminal for his chapter on Surface; part of his chapter titled "Three Reminders to Architects."  Ms. Kelly writes, "Given his dismissive 'fear' of American architects, Le Corbusier was perhaps unaware the two 980ft-long terminal buildings were designed by Cass Gilbert, the architect of the Neo-Gothic Woolworth Building."  The Army Terminal was a crucial link in the endless chain of shipping along the south Brooklyn waterfront in the pre-World War II period.  The terminal was conceived during the First World War to facilitate supplies sent to the Western Front.  The Army Terminal "...followed the innovative international port model first used in the adjacent Bush Terminal in 1895."  Train track ran along and through the huge warehouses, connect by rail and a sky bridge.  The enormous sheds spread themselves across the four individual harbors.  The warehouses took up about four million square feet, making it the largest reinforced concrete building in the world in 1919.  During Prohibition, it was briefly used as a storehouse for contraband liquor. In World War II, the Army Terminal employed as many as 56,000 people, processing over three million soldiers and sailor, and almost 40 million tons of supplies.

Arcades at Brooklyn Army Terminal
benheimer.com

The Brooklyn Army Terminal was decommissioned in the early seventies and remained unused for a decade.  In 1981, it was purchased by New York City, from the federal government, with the goal of restoring it for use as a light manufacturing warehouse.  Over a twenty year period and four phased renovation, the terminal has been slowly put back to work by the New York City Economic Development Corporation to become a key agent of the Brooklyn waterfront regeneration.

Typically, warehouses were built quickly during wartime, yet they were intended to last in anticipation of conversion to peacetime activities thus all local building codes were used.  The interiors were designed for more versatile combinations of space, making them ready for contemporary mixed-usage.  At present, over 100 companies and 3,000 workers occupy the Army Terminal, all encouraged by tax and business incentives.  Ms. Kelly writes, "By establishing a critical mass of light manufacturing and business activities, the continued uses of the Brooklyn Army Terminal is seeding much-needed economic growth in one the city's most down-at-heel former industrial neighborhoods."  The Brooklyn Army Terminal was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983; its potential as an engine for economic regeneration, not its cultural heritage has insured its survival.  Ms. Kelly adds, "Its innovative, monumental construction and inclusion in modernism's most influential manifesto privileges the Brooklyn Army Terminal in the American industrial vernacular.  However, its significance as an icon of twentieth century design has yet to be fully celebrated."

The Grain Elevator
buffalohistoryworks.com

The City of Buffalo, New York was once the focus of trans-continental grain shipment.  By 1858, it was already known as the "the great gate of Cereal," on its way to becoming the the world's largest grain port. The painstakingly slow manual process of transferring the grain between ships and smaller canal vessels was revolutionize by local businessman Joseph Dart in 1842.  Joseph Dart developed a bucket elevator system that scooped up the grain from the boats into vertical bins, using a steam powered conveyor belt, giving birth to the grain elevator.

The silo skyline had both an aesthetic and technological affect on Buffalo.  Pictures taken of the grain elevators incorporated examples that were immensely influential on the European avant-garde when they were published in Walter Gropius in Jahrbuch des Deutschen Werkbundes (1913).  They were reproduced in Le Corbusier's book (First Reminder to Architects: Volume) and lauded as "the magnificent fruits of the new age."  German architect Bruno Taut feature the photographs in his 1929 book Modern Architecture, making the Buffalo Concrete Central elevator part of the visual vocabulary.  After sketching the 1913 photographs, Erich Mendelsohn visited the city in 1924, specifically to document the grain elevators.  Miriam Kelly remarks, "Remarkably, he was the only European early modernist to see the buildings first hand."

Grain being lowered into a ship's hold
buffaloah.com

 Quoting Erich Mendelsohn:

Mountainous silos, incredibly space-conscious, but creating space.  A random confusion amidst the chaos of loading and unloading...of railways and bridges, crane monsters with live gestures, hordes of silo cells in concrete, stone and glazed brick.  Then suddenly a silo administrative buildings, closed horizontal fronts against the stupendous verticals of fifty to a hundred cylinders, and all this in the sharp evening light...Everything else so far now seem to have been shaped interim to my silo dreams.

In contemporary times, the grain elevators make the very collection of American extant grain elevators; collectively composed of a variety of material, building typologies, and technical innovations that irrevocably changed the manner in which grain is handled.  Unfortunately, a small number of sites have been razed.  However, nearly twenty elevators from the final years of the nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries survived the collapse of the Great Lake grain trade. Most of the silos sit abandoned while a few are still used to handle grain.  All in all, the silo form an amazing part of the landscape, creating a beautiful, vertical, sculptural group along the Buffalo River.

Watch boat along Elevator Alley
buffalorising.com

Rick Smith, the president of Rigidized Metals in Buffalo, recognized that the grain elevators were in peril and bought three of the grain elevators at the back of his factory.  At first, Mr. Smith wanted to keep the area industrial; opening an ethanol plant. This idea proved unfeasible and searched for an alternative solution.  His search led him to a preservation conference where he was inspired by the lecturers's enthusiastic presentations on identity and historic value as ways to enhance economic progress, which led him to value the silo in a different way. What Mr. Smith needed was public engagement and a way to make money.  A portion of his plan for Silo City encompasses making it a center for design-a place where art and commerce meet.  Mr. Smith envisions Silo City as an incubator for design students as well as a showcase for local businesses.  Rick Smith hopes that Silo city will attract, not only residents from the city but also from the suburbs.  Mr. Smith has come up with a fantastic concept which has a great deal potential to revitalize this economically struggling city. (http://www.fastcompany.com)

Ford Motor Company
Detroit, Michigan
commons.wikimedia.org

Finally, we turned to Detroit, Michigan, the Motor City home of America's automobile industry.  Miriam Kelly writes, "When Le Corbusier put forward utopian plans for a linear...he was influenced by Detroit.  The Motor City of the 1930s functioned as an interconnected locus of production within which individual industrial plants were organized around linear production lines."  The Swiss-French architect toured the Ford Motor Company in 1935, convinced that the assembly line process, used to make cars, could be adapted to build industries elsewhere.  In a call against suburbanization, it is possible that the architect anticipated the city's decentralization and sowing the seeds for its post-industrial demise.

The collapse of the automobile industrial, racial strife, the abandonment of the historic core, rapid suburbanization, and land erosion have resulted in a landscape unable to adapt to the type of innovation is so desperately needs.  With about forty square miles of available plots and one third of the buildings abandoned, available space is both an asset and liability to the city.  To deal with the long term economic revival of the city, a report
Detroit Future City Strategic Framework, was released to the general public.  The DFC Strategic Framework is an extremely detailed long term outline for decision making by Detroit stakeholders. (http://www.detroitfuturecity.com)  Ms. Kelly writes, "A key proposal in Detroit Future City... (published in January 2013) is a twenty year framework for consolidating the redundant land of Motor City into a 'canvas of green.'  The former...of a new connective landscape is an affordable response to rationalizing the city's infrastructure, redefining neighborhoods, remediating industrial food contamination and producing food.

The Packard Plant, 1954
Albert Kahn
Photography by Hugo90
blog.hemmings.com

One key item that Ms. Kelly observes is Detroit's shift in attitude.  She reports, "As attitudes shift from ruination towards regeneration, the Detroit's problems are so profound as to present an opportunity to envision radical..."  As the former epicenter of the automobile industry, the industrial heritage of Detroit is globally significant and very crucial to the city's future.  Ms. Kelly suggests, "Urban strategies that build on the Motor City's rich industrial legacy should enable Detroit...just to redevelop itself, but reimagine what a post-industrial city ought to be."

As cultural attitudes and conservation strategies towards modernist buildings become well defined, the scholarship surrounding the reading of industrial buildings, which inspired the modern movement, has further to go.  Together with renewed appreciation of industrial buildings as 'heritage,' Ms. Kelly reports, "...some progress is being made to protect America's historic industrial sites.  However, important structures remain at risk without proper recognition of their contribution to modernism or as extraordinary buildings in their own right."  Many of this buildings endure simply because it costs too much and too time consuming to demolish them.  This can actually work to their advantage by making these industrial buildings suitable for adaptive reuse.  Post-modernist scholarship revealed Le Corbusier's grain elevator as evidence of the importance of symbolism and image over function. Thus, the conversion to a post-industrial landscape, recognition of their importance, and their adaptive reuse are extremely necessary for the future of these buildings.