Archinect - News

Buffalo’s Great Northern Grain Elevator and the fight to preserve local architectural history

2022-01-25T18:13:00-05:00

The building’s current owner — Archer Daniels Midland Milling Co., part of the farm and food products giant — has been pushing to demolish the Great Northern, setting off a furious fight between preservationists and the company.

The 125-year-old building has been credited with inspiring a host of modernist architects like Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier. The building’s facade was gashed open by a windstorm that has left its empty interior partially exposed since December 12th. At least three previous owners have attempted to demolish the beloved historic building that was for a long time operated by the Pillsbury company, which sold the building to its current owners in the early 1990s.

Archer Daniels Midland Milling Co. has been seeking an emergency petition to raze the building that was granted a stay by an appellate judge in state supreme court earlier this month. The judge has called for mediation sessions this week between the company and conservationists who want to save the damaged structure that they say will leave a massive void on the city’s visual imagination.

“These were the kind of cathedrals of the modern age,” Gregory Delaney, an assistant professor of architecture at the University at Buff...

LA DALLMAN wins 68th Progressive Architecture Award for the transformation of a Historic Grain Elevator

2021-03-26T18:36:00-04:00

LA DALLMAN Architects was recently named as one of five winners of the 68th Annual Progressive Architecture Awards by Architect Magazine for 2021. Their proposal for the transformation of the Teweles and Brandeis Grain Elevator in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin was selected from a total of 125 commissioned, yet unbuilt, entries that best exemplified recent trends in "community engagement, environmental stewardship, and equitable access to services''. With this in consideration, the jury of Koray Duman of Büro Koray Duman, Jeanne Gang of Studio Gang, and Daimian Hines of Hines Architecture + Design through a blind review found LA DALLMAN’s entry to be a great embodiment of community design.

Redesign of the Teweles and Brandeis Grain Elevator. Credit: LA DALLMAN

Originally built in 1901 the Teweles and Brandeis Grain Elevator was once a marker at one end of the great agricultural economy that transformed the midwestern territories into America’s breadbasket. It is primarily from this farming ...

The grain elevators of the Canadian prairie are disappearing

2020-01-20T15:09:00-05:00

Grain elevators were once an icon of Canada’s west: often painted a bright boxcar red, they stood in towns across Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. [...] In the 1930s there were nearly 6,000 towers; now fewer than a thousand remain. The destruction, in many ways, mirrors the broader decline of rural communities in western Canada.

For The Guardian, journalist Leyland Cecco on the struggle of small agricultural communities in Canada's prairie provinces to preserve their aging, wooden grain elevators as cultural heritage monuments.

Restored Alberta Wheat Pool elevators at the Canadian Grain Elevator Discovery Centre in Nanton, Alberta. Photo: Tony Hisgett

Once the pride of every community and dubbed "prairie castles" for their often imposing heights in the flat landscape, thousands of them were left to rot and eventually faced demolition. Only a handful of lucky structures managed to win protection status, such as at the Canadian Grain Elevator Discovery Centre in Nanton, Alberta or the Prairie Elevator Museum in Acadia, AB.

A student architect's plan to repurpose grain elevators into community spaces

2015-07-21T10:52:00-04:00

[Ali] Piwowar, who studied at Carleton University in Ottawa, wrote her masters thesis in architecture on preserving the heritage of grain elevators by transforming them into community spaces. Saskatchewan once had over 3,000 wooden grain elevators. One by one, however, the structures have been disappearing from the skyline, victims of changing economic and transportation conditions. Today, Piwowar estimates there are around 400 such elevators remaining with only 80 in working order.

More from the world of grain elevators and their reuse potentials: