Design
The Toughest Re-Use: Grain Elevators
Not easy to convert, some cities still manage to find new ways to bring life to their abandoned grain elevators.
Le Corbusier wrote this in his 1923 collection of essays, Towards a New Architecture, in admiration of the painfully rational, utilitarian structures that are grain elevators.
Originally invented in the 1840s, the first grain elevators were wood-framed structures, making them prone to setting on fire. The ones LeCorbusier would have seen in the early 20th century were steel-framed structures built with concrete, a method that has kept so many of them standing as testaments to a bygone era.