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I wouldn't say that I'm especially interested in modernist architecture. I just have a big curiosity for the human environment and conditions of life, and we are still living in the age of modernism. –Gerrit Engel 1
Buffalo's grain elevators were among those commercial buildings designed with a functional purpose in a basic industrial style that provided the modernist movement with powerful and monumental architectural forms. Modernism, in architecture as in art, was a movement known for its urban and industrial focus. It began as a break from tradition, with a fascination for the essential nature of materials, and with a respect for everyday life in the modern world. Yet the arguments and theories of this twentieth-century aesthetic are not Gerrit Engel's primary concern.
A century ago, Europeans, and specifically Germans, came to Buffalo to see these structures for the first time. In the late 1990s, Engel came to study and to photograph the grain elevators, now mostly in disrepair, in order to reexamine their original inspiration for a new form of architecture. For Engel, these enormous elevators reflect the history of the twentieth century's great technological advances as well as the changing view albeit continued love of modernism.
rick in rectangular shapes, these mammoth structures transformed a small western outpost into the single largest grain port in the history of the world. Buffalo's location between the farmland of the Midwest and the markets of the East Coast was strategic, necessitating the creation of structures capable of unloading and shipping as much grain in an hour as the previous labor-intensive system could handle in an entire day. By the time the more iconic, reinforced-concrete grain elevator was constructed in Buffalo in 1906, the elevators had come to represent the city's skyrocketing prosperity.
In the early 1900s, when black-and-white photographs of these elevators, often culled from newspapers, reached the European avant-garde, Buffalo's elevators – and the city – became well known throughout the world. Even though few Europeans had seen the elevators first hand, photographs of these aesthetically pure, geometric structures began to influence a new architectural sensibility. The modernist movement was fated to strip European architecture of its highly decorated style.
In Walter Gropius' "Jahrbuch des Deutschen Werkbundes," 1913, and in Le Corbusier's Towards A New Architecture, 1931, the simple and purely functional forms of industrial buildings were celebrated in comparison to a range of historic and contemporary predecessors, such as the Egyptian pyramids, Greek temples, automobiles, airplanes, and steamships. Visiting Buffalo in 1924, awestruck Erich Mendelsohn wrote to his wife of their "childlike forms." He described them as "awkward, full of elemental power, submissive to pure need. Primitive in their function of sucking in and spitting out again ... the preliminary phase of a future world just beginning to order itself."2
Engel's visit to America seventy-one years later echoed Mendelsohn's homage to the remarkable structures that had inspired the dominant style of twentieth-century architecture. Engel's large color photographs reflect the passage of modernism, from a theoretical idea in need of examples to a pervasive trend that has touched all aspects of art and design. Looking back at the turn-of-the-century black-and-white images taken from a constant and distant vantage point that often cropped out the surrounding environment, we see thumbnail sketches of an abstract idea. In contrast, Engel takes his photographs at numerous and different angles: some are up close, while others are at a distance, demonstrating relationships to other elevators and the surrounding transportation network. Still others depict the encompassing and continually evolving landscapes.
As the twentieth century comes to a close, modernism is no longer the single dominant force. Scholars, historians, and theorists of postmodernism question modernism's premise that mankind is perfectible through technology and reason. They criticize its single view as insufficient to interpret events with multiple meanings and values. Concurrently, Engel has said that the Buffalo grain elevators must be interpreted as complex, contemporary sculptures, as well as historical documents: "They are individuals with stories to tell and questions to ask."
The saturated color of Engel's images also encourages us to question the history of these elevators in a more complete way. Forsaking the distant reserve of the historic photographs, Engel zooms in to reveal peeling paint, rusted metal, graffiti, and lush greenery. In contrast to the vibrant new cars, trucks, trains, sailboats, and the occasional fisherman that define contemporary time, the buildings in Engel's photographs seem faded. The elevators are hues of dull browns, grays, and blacks, differing dramatically from the robust greens, reds, and blues of the surrounding landscape. Nevertheless, the grandeur of their forms remains, and Engel uses the syntax of modernism to highlight their present position. Abstraction, repetition, and a focus on geometric shapes have become a vehicle to emphasize new relationships – the similarity to medieval city structures, the majesty of ancient ruins, and the junkyard. As Engel's photographs describe the rows of broken windows and the striations of cracking concrete, he completes an elevator's historical cycle.
When they were new, the grain elevators in Buffalo were not considered beautiful, or desirable, symbols of progress. Their size evoked big business's greed and its consumption of resources for profit. One writer from the mid-1800s stated, "An elevator is as ugly a monster as has been yet produced."3 And in 1891, they were called "indescribably ugly structures... [that] shock the artistic eye with their hideously grotesque angularity... [they] break the sky line, like huge chunks of darkness set up... These [are] nightmare buildings."4
While Engel's photographs may remind us of these initial sentiments, they recall as well the sense of wonder that the earlier Europeans had for these mammoth structures. The perspective from which Engel photographs the elevators accentuates their compelling stature and hints at their powerful influence. Here, they loom with increasing disproportion over the surrounding environment. Possessing the dignity of age, while appearing slightly out of place, they stand as witnesses to the past. Engel intentionally accentuates the personal and specific over broad, formal concerns. While his predecessors named their photographs generically, Grain Elevator, Buffalo, NY, to de-emphasize the buildings' individuality in the pursuit of universal ideas, Engel says:
They are not only "Grain Elevators, Buffalo, NY" to me. These buildings are individuals with a history, that influenced history. The passing of time shapes their personality, like it does with humans.
Engel titles his works after specific buildings: Concrete Central, Cargill Superior, H-O Oats, and Marine Tower, for example, and focuses on one place rather than a range of industrial locations. As he said, "I spent time there, got to know the structures" by exploring them thoroughly, inside and out, evaluating their plans, and even taking measurements for further research. This thoughtful examination mirrors Engel's childhood enchantment with another industrial site – the coal mine – which he saw out of his window as a young boy; for him, this specific place is wrapped in many layers of memory. He says "We played there, I was fascinated by this place, and cried when they tore it down. That's where I took my first photographs."
For contemporary residents of Buffalo, the fifteen existing grain elevators represent the grandeur that once flourished here. They are, as The Buffalo News recently reported, "ghosts of a prosperous yesterday." They are constant reminders to commuters who travel past these buildings of a better time, when industry provided ample jobs. Because Buffalo's financial success depended upon its location, changes in transportation routes profoundly undermined its economic progress. Today, most silos are vacant, standing as a virtual museum of modern grain-silo architecture; a few companies continue operation in the area, most notably General Mills, which still stores the most grain in America.
In the end, Engel's project is about architecture and its symbolic significance. Buildings – their design, their decoration, and their state of health – speak volumes about the changing state of both the theoretical ideas and communities that surround them. Most recently, Engel has focused his camera on the largest housing complex in Germany – Marzahn, a place with 60,000 apartments for 150,000 people – which has recently undergone renovations and "architectural improvements." Built under communism in East Berlin, its function has changed because the communal society for which it was built is gone. As Engel says, "Marzahn is a place that 'suffers' a shift of values and conditions, like the grain elevators do." In a sense, the industrial landscape has become an appropriate backdrop for the twentieth century not just because it has formed the scenery of our age, but because it embodies our personal relationship to our continuously changing opinion of technology and its consequences. While Buffalo's grain elevators were once symbols of a belief in progress, their abandonment reflects the realities of newer technologies and newer markets. The intellectual recognition of modernism's dark side does not completely eradicate our wonder in the majesty of these buildings.
- Claire Schneider, Assistant Curator
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