The grain of the image

The concrete silo that developed as part of a vital network for the transhipment of grain is now best remembered for the pure form of its minimal cylinders: It was this dichotomy between dynamic performance and static form that the critic Reyner Banham confronted when he came to teach at the State University of New York, Buffalo in 1976.1 Banham, already an inuential architectural critic in Britain, was struck by the intense physicality of these celebrated stuctures, which he had known only from the gritty reproductions he had found on the pages of modernist manifestos. These images of grain elevators had inuenced the way that Europeans thought about the general state of American architecture as well as the developing aesthetic of modernism and the discussion over the future course of the discipline. The dierence between how the silos were understood either through images or through rst-hand experience struck a chord with Banham, which would lead to a sustained reection on the fact that the conduit by means of which the grain elevators had profoundly inuenced the development of a non-industrial architectural aesthetic was photographic. Indeed Banham would make the claim that the International Style, “must be the rst architectural movement in the history of art based almost exclusively on photographic evidence rather than the ancient and previously unavoidable techniques of personal inspection and measured drawing.”2.