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Silo dreams: metamorphoses of the grain elevator

Owen Hatherley

To cite this article: Owen Hatherley (2015) Silo dreams: metamorphoses of the grain elevator,
The Journal of Architecture, 20:3, 474-488, DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2015.1045011

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Published online: 11 Jun 2015.

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 474

The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 20
Number 3

Silo dreams: metamorphoses of the

grain elevator
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Owen Hatherley London, United Kingdom (Author’s e-mail address:

owenhatherley@gmail.com)

This paper focuses on the figure of the grain silo, a familiar presence in modernist historio-
graphy—the monumental concrete structures in North America that were collected by
Walter Gropius and then by Le Corbusier, who both claimed to find in them inspiration for
a wholly ‘new’ form of architecture. Rather than follow this line (which culminates in
Banham’s corrective account of the silos’ reality, and their real designers, in A Concrete
Atlantis), I will instead concentrate on the particular ideological and political ideas that
were embedded in the image of the silo (and the related image of the blast furnace), particu-
larly with the reception of Le Corbusier’s ideas in the Soviet Union. Here, the silo was first
embraced by the architectural avant-garde, such as Moisei Ginzburg—who, tellingly, used
‘American’ images of grain silos rather than those nearer to hand of similar structures in
St Petersburg—and then became an all-purpose image of industrial modernity as the USSR
moved towards its first Five Year Plan. In the propaganda of the plan, the grain silo features
frequently, in posters, magazines and films, as an image of an achieved, or achievable, eman-
cipatory modernity, unifying city and country: and as an authoritarian image of sheer power
and vastness. Much of this hinges on the contradictory role of the silo as both rural and
industrial, monumental and disposable, and also, in aesthetics, both ancient and modern.
Wilhelm Worringer’s analysis of ‘Egyptian Art’ compared American grain silos to the
structures of Ancient Egypt, as images of an essentially blank-minded, ultra-organised and
despotic state. It will be asked whether the image world of the silo under Stalinism
created something similar.

Once during the night (Jan) Hempel woke up—he
suffered terrible stomach pains—and he said ‘two
blast furnaces have just been fired in Magnito-
gorsk’. He really would sit in that stinking cell
and talk about Magnitogorsk with a kind of
quiet passion. A dreamer. That was the point of
connection with the former sun worshipper who
used to pray to the sun in the morning; now he
worshipped the glow that rose from the blast fur-
naces of Magnitogorsk—an easy transition, isn’t it
so? Since we’re talking about Magnitogorsk, we
really did dream of the blast furnaces there.
Alexander Wat on Communist prisoners in
Poland, 1931, from My Century1
According to Hegel, the ‘truth is concrete’, and
accordingly there has been, in studies of the con-
crete fetishes of the modern movement, a certain
assumption that rationality and technocracy underlie
the embrace of certain concrete forms. One of the
structures that is at the heart of the modern move-

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ment in architecture, both in its earliest incarnations
and arguably in its later inspiration for the bare con-
crete forms of Brutalism, is the Grain Silo, as pio-
neered in North America at the turn of the
twentieth century. Although some of the earliest
grain silos were in steel, those that were published
and distributed en masse in Europe, after their
‘discovery’ by Walter Gropius and the Deutscher
Werkbund, used reinforced concrete on a scale
that had never been seen before, creating
immense, sheer volumes sculpted out of the material
as if from clay—pure, monumental, imposing,
apparently without historical referent.
This form is often taken as one of pure technoc-
racy, an elegant form created by technical impera-
tives, a sort of accidental functionalism. It is also,
notably, one of the first architectures to be identifi-
ably made purely of reinforced concrete, although
there were in fact several steel and even wood
examples. Aside from the monumental hangars of
the First World War, or, more arguably, the early
buildings of Auguste Perret, these were the earliest
major structures to showcase the aesthetic and func-
tional possibilities of ferro-concrete: its shapes, its
spans, its surfaces. There is no accident that Reyner
Banham’s study of American industrial architecture,
focusing largely on these silos, refers to this imagined
landscape as a ‘concrete Atlantis’. However, it has
been inserted since into a familiar debate about the
modern movement, and its inability to differentiate
between an image of industrial progress and its tech-
nological actuality, Banham’s major theme.
However, there are several other meanings to this
concrete structure, which are associated much
more with the political history of the inter-war
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years: particularly, how the image of the silo was
received as an image of progress in regimes which
aimed to go beyond American-style capitalism into
a different kind of industrial system altogether.
There is another history of the cult of the grain
silo, one which is at the centre of the aesthetics of
the early Soviet Union. Here, it is yoked to another
debate entirely, one which has some connection to
the debates around modern architecture in
Germany or France, particularly in the peculiar Pla-
tonic language that was often used to discuss its aes-
thetic effect. However, its Soviet reception has much
more to do with the iconography of the forced
industrialisation that occurred in this territory from
1928 onwards. In the process, the image of the
grain silo gradually shifted from an image of Platonic
perfection, through to an image of industrial moder-
nity, culminating as an image of political power.
To illustrate the way in which the seemingly objec-
tive and functional images of industry can be under-
stood as dream-images, and heavily politicised
dream-images at that, we could examine the way
in which photographs of the grain silo travel across
the United States, Germany, France and the Soviet
Union in the twenty or so years between 1911 and
1932. A particular industrial object—the ‘silo’ or
‘grain elevator’, invented in the first decade of the
twentieth century in the north American port cities
of Buffalo and Minneapolis, as an economic and
expedient structural solution to the problem of
storing enormous quantities of grain, enabled by
ferro-concrete—became the object for various
kinds of mediated collective dreaming, and in the
process it ceased to be a merely functional structure
and acquired various imputed new meanings.
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There is a well-known sequence in architectural
historiography, best described in Reyner Banham’s
definitive work A Concrete Atlantis—US Industrial
Building and European Modern Architecture, by
which a series of images of grain elevators are
passed from Germany through to France through
to the Soviet Union, where European interpretations
of these structures become so dominant that Amer-
ican architectural historians prefer to use grainy and
doctored photographs taken from the European
architectural canon rather than actually walking to
and documenting structures that are in direct proxi-
mity.2 Banham’s dream-analysis—the titular refer-
ence to imaginary continents is key—draws
attention to how these wholly utilitarian objects
become the focus for both futuristic and archaic,
dynamic and eternal ideas and dreams. However, it
misses out an unexpected political postscript.
The silos were first ‘discovered’ by moneyed Euro-
pean travellers around 1910, and at first it was travel
literature rather than architectural criticism which
registered their importance. Annemarie Jaeggi, in
her monograph on avant-garde Americanism in
one German factory, found that one of the
first accounts is in the German socialist Arthur
Holitzscher’s travelogue Amerika—Heute und
Morgen, where from the very start these structures
are seen as something superhuman, transcendent
of normal earthly capacities: the work of giants. He
compared them, in a metaphor that strikingly fuses
mythology and bureaucracy, to ‘cartridges in the car-
tridge pouch of a God’, and then compared them to
those dream-world filing cabinets, the ‘skyscrapers’.
Moreover, the abundance of produce, of food
within them, is the concrete embodiment of
another kind of myth—the American Dream itself
—as ‘the live force of the earth is gathered in
them, the fulfilled hope of the millions who stream
into the country’.3 The focus, for Jaeggi as for
Banham, was a series of photographs—often,
press cuttings—collected by the young German
architect Walter Gropius.
Gropius began accumulating these images at
around 1910, helped by the collecting efforts of
his later wife Alma Mahler, who was in the USA
between October, 1910 and March, 1911; others
were taken, according to Jaeggi, from ‘German
periodicals on structural engineering’ and from the
contacts of Carl Benscheidt, Gropius’s patron for
the first major work of Americanist German architec-
ture, the Fagus shoe last Factory in Alfeld.4 He first
exhibited them in 1911, at a lecture on industrial
art and building in Hagen, and later, and most
famously, in the 1913 Yearbook of the German
Werkbund. The 1911 lecture where he first dis-
played these images wrested from the new world
sets out what would become an extremely influen-
tial position—a combination of socially concerned
‘reformed’ capitalism, of the sort identified with
Walther Rathenau and the AEG corporation, and
an appeal to the awesome eternal values of form
and hierarchy.
Banham’s quotations from the 1911 lecture make
clear how Gropius’ quasi-Fabian industrial reformism
suddenly switches into an unexpected archaic-futur-
istic rhetoric. ‘Work must be established in palaces
that give the workman, now a slave to industrial
labour, not only light, air and hygiene, but also an
indication of the great common idea that drives
everything.’ This is not just the Fordist approach of

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increasing pay and increasing the accessibility of
consumer goods: it is something more complex,
and could be uncharitably described as the use of
socialism’s promise of collective fulfilment to
ensure the perpetuation of capitalism, something
which was by no means certain in the decade in
which Gropius was writing. ‘Only then’, he con-
tinues, ‘can the individual submit to the impersonal
without losing the joy of working together for that
greater common good previously unattainable by a
single individual. This awareness in every worker
could even ward off the kind of social catastrophe
that seems to be brewing daily in our present econ-
omic system.’ By social catastrophe, we can no
doubt read ‘revolution’ as much as ‘immiseration’.5
Yet what happens next is, as Banham emphasises,
entirely out of kilter with this careful rhetoric of
social peace and harmony. The new collective
society looks strikingly like the society where slaves
built gigantic and baffling works of mathematically
precise architecture to house the dead.
In America, the Motherland of Industry … the
compelling monumentality of the Canadian and
South American grain elevators, the coaling
bunkers built for the leading railway companies
and the newest work halls of the great North
American industrial trusts can almost bear com-
parison with the work of the ancient Egyptians
in their overwhelming monumental power (…)
American builders have retained a natural
feeling for large compact forms fresh and intact.6
What fascinated Gropius was not necessarily the
association of death and hierarchy as such, although
any discussion of Egyptian architecture that ignores
that association would surely be deficient. The
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associations he was courting were of overwhelming
power, scale and size, and a sort of noble savage
approach to form, unencumbered by the influence
of classicism or the European tradition. As such, it
is in part the purity of the silos that Gropius
admired. Like the social peace he longed for, they
suggest the stopping of the clock at a fixed point,
the replacement of flux and conflict with gigantic
and eternal form.
The photographs of repeated, bulging concrete
forms, still extremely striking in their reductive
abstraction and scale, would support this assertion
at least to some extent. Yet the forms themselves
are in no way easily reducible to this purist ideal.
Banham notes that grain elevators could be ‘as addi-
tive/subtractive as the work on a Gothic cathedral’:
an image that would fascinate Gropius as he
turned briefly towards a more radical socialism in
the revolutionary aftermath of the First World War,
the ‘Cathedral of Socialism’ which the Bauhaus
aimed to build. Gropius, at least, was susceptible
to the pull of both purism and expressionism,
which explains his fascination with forms that
could either exhibit ‘classical clarity’ or ‘picturesque
‘dynamism’ and the appearance of ‘organic’
growth’.7 The grain elevator can be interpreted as
an Expressionist or Constructivist structure as much
as a classical, Platonic one; Banham even pointed
out that early concrete silos had gigantic moving
parts in the form of the ‘loose legs’ that transported
the grain, something which makes them cognisant
with Constructivist and Expressionist dreams of
mobile architecture—although, typically, he noted
that European observers were unaware of this par-
ticular example of structural futurism.
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The most famous ‘classical’ interpretation of the
silos is directly dependent on Gropius’ cuttings col-
lection—a series of early 1920s’ articles by Le Corbu-
sier in L’Espirit Nouveau and collected in Vers une
Architecture. Paris Purism’s re-use of the images
reformulated them in influentially classicising
terms, which entailed an approach to the historical
record that presages the notorious doctoring of
photographs in the Stalin era in the USSR, with Le
Corbusier retouching the photographs in order to
remove any nearby structures that might complicate
the image of giant forms standing aloof, and more
directly removing any remnants of combined and
uneven architectural development, with the filing
away of historicist pediments from one of the silo
images.8 In the process, any element of montage
and conflict was removed.9 Corbusier’s commentary
on Gropius’ images takes the archaic, eternal, pre-
historic elements that he introduces into the dis-
course on concrete grain elevators, but the
philosophical ancestry becomes more direct. The
architect talks of ‘cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders
or pyramids (…) the great primary forms; the
image of these is distinct and tangible within us
and without ambiguity’.10 This is—as Banham
notes —the introduction of Platonism, something
which would seem to be inevitable after the Egyp-
tians were mentioned; an aesthetics of stillness
that would seem to sit oddly with the noise and
chaos of modern industry. In fact, Corbusier
quotes Plato unattributed, where he claims that
the grain elevators ‘make the work of man ring in
unison with the universal order’.11 This is necessarily
the terminus of Gropius’ pseudo-radical conflation
of social peace and monumental form.
The Platonic vision of ‘American’ industrial archi-
tecture led to some moments of pure bathos, as
the dream of America as a New Egypt comes up
against the extreme impurity of a commercially
driven form. Banham noted that:
The diagonal lattices and tapering trusses of
bridges and cranes were unacceptable in some
Parisian quarters. ‘The work of the engineer,
pure in its origins, begins gradually to be adulter-
ated by pure aesthetic pursuits. The crane which is
seen on this page is soaked in romantic expres-
sionism’, averred an anonymous caption writer
in Cahiers d’Art in 1926 under an illustration of
a spidery but otherwise ordinary German coaling
gantry. The comment is the more remarkable
since it is patently obvious to us now, and must
have been equally so then to thoughtful obser-
vers, that neither the designers nor the investors
in such an installation would be likely to deviate
from the strict and objective rationality of econ-
omical construction—or profit, if you prefer.12
Yet this, while adroitly pointing out the absurdity of
the Platonic version of the dream, is also valuable for
making clear just how little the ‘silo dreams’ of an
aesthete’s industrial America, inspired by the view
of context-less photographs, had to do with a
dream of straightforward economic and functional
efficiency. In short, if the longing for a fully mechan-
ised industrial economy was based purely on the
desire to increase exploitation, then where had all
this aesthetic speculation come from? Why would
it matter what the forms thrown up looked like,
and why would anyone archly critique the form of
an industrial structure for not living up to an imagin-
ary, instinctive, predestined aesthetic ideal? Rather,

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with remarkable speed, they were able to mean
whatever the interpreter of the image wanted
them to mean, and a non-functional surplus devel-
oped that cannot be contained in any critique of
Fordism or related ‘utilitarianism’. This becomes
especially clear when examining two other Silo
dream-testimonies, from the Expressionist and Con-
structivist camps.
The earlier of the two is the Soviet architect Moisei
Ginzburg’s Style and Epoch (1924), a somewhat
Spenglerian manifesto for a Constructivist architec-
ture. Unlike other accounts, such as Le Corbusier’s,
or Walter Curt Behrendt’s 1927 Victory of the New
Building Style, Ginzburg did not take his silo
images from Gropius’ scrapbook; and they were
not remotely classical images, but something
rougher: primal, certainly, but also full of conflict,
drama and movement. All of them are captioned
‘Silos (Buffalo)’, but their stylistic complexities are
fascinating. The first of these grain elevators13
does not look serene but raw and aggressive, with
the sort of spindly metal-legged outgrowths on top
that horrified Cahiers d’Art.
On the second,14 there is an expressionistic over-
head bridge several storeys up; and the third is sky-
scraper-like, with its extreme verticality emphasised
by the cropping of the photograph.15 Although
Ginzburg credits the Ancient Egyptians with the dis-
covery of standardisation as a counter-argument to
traditionalists, his images are not of eternal forms;
and there is nothing Platonic about these bizarre
asymmetries and changes of level. Here, the vision
of the silos is harsh, unstable, as low-grade and gim-
crack as the cheap reproduction technology used in
Ginzburg’s book design, and this extends to the
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rhetoric itself, which, while still deliberately archaic
and atavistic in its references—this is still a primal
futurism—is markedly more plebeian than that of
Gropius or Corbusier. Ginzburg asserts that ‘what
is needed, at all costs, is the daring blood of barbar-
ians who do not know what they are creating’, ‘the
entire gamut of “vandalisms”, which means to avoid
at all costs “the stodgy products of the classical
system”’.16 By all means, as Banham argues, Ginz-
burg’s rhetoric is derivative, but the difference in
emphasis means that the silo no longer has the con-
notations of order and the eternal, but rather of an
insurgent futurism, one unconcerned with Platonism
in either its political or aesthetic forms.
However, one of the most instructive elements in
the silo assemblages collected by Ginzburg is pre-
cisely that they mostly ignore any European
examples lest they complicate the notion of
America as a land of primal technology that can be
harnessed to a Communist project. The dream of
America was not wholly a post-revolutionary
matter. There is, in St Petersburg, a grain elevator
broadly comparable to those illustrated by Gropius
and Ginzburg, and doctored by Le Corbusier: the
Flour Mill and Grain Elevator of the Warehouse
Society, a gigantic concrete grain storage and
milling complex, completed in 1912.17 This
complex does not quite exhibit the bulging, cylindri-
cal Platonic volumes of the classic elevators, but then
neither do many of the complexes reproduced in
Style and Epoch. The Warehouse Society buildings
are monumental, abstract, angular, harsh and non-
representational, but with a centralisation and sym-
metry the American engineers largely avoided, with
its two tower-like turrets introducing a minor
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element of ‘architecture’ and European tradition
into the barbarous assemblage. It seems extremely
unlikely that a Soviet architect as erudite and well-
travelled as Ginzburg would be unaware of such a
large complex in the city of the October Revolution;
the reasons for its absence seem to be rather more
directly political.
While this complex would very amply make a
more meta-political point about the extreme levels
of combined and uneven development in the
Russia of the 1910s, where this highly technically
advanced complex coexisted with (indeed, directly
capitalised on the proceeds of) a truly primeval
rural poverty, its absence speaks volumes about
the purposes of the idea of ‘America’. An image of
a pre-revolutionary Russian industrial building
would immediately suggest a continuity between
the Soviet dream of a socialist America, and the
abortive industrial revolution of late Tsarism. While
it might seem counter-intuitive to suggest that
America was in some way ‘less’ capitalist than the
Tsarist Empire, it did have less direct connotations
of the society that Bolshevism and Soviet power
set out to destroy.
As Alan M. Ball makes clear in his account of
Soviet representations of America in the 1920s and
1930s, America was subject to a strange slippage
of categories, where it was on the one hand the epi-
centre of exploitation and on the other a collection
of new technologies, new forms and new organis-
ational methods that could be (critically) appro-
priated; in fact, it was in some ways considered
less capitalist than France, Germany or the UK,
absurd as this might be in literal terms. ‘America’
played the role of enabling an (attainable) fantasy
of industrial abundance, without needing to imply
the need for any restoration of capitalism to
achieve it.18 In this slippage of terms, where
‘America’ becomes more ‘progressive’ for the
Soviets than Europe while being more capitalist,
the grain silo has a particularly key role. Like the
United States, but unlike France or Germany, the
Soviet Union was hardly dominated by urban land
uses. Not only was most of the country a rural
expanse, at the time that Ginzburg wrote Style and
Epoch, 80% of the population were peasants.
Because of this, the grain silo’s representation of
rural functionality—an ultra-modern form that
nonetheless is used to store and distribute agricul-
tural produce—would be particularly important in
the iconography of Soviet industrialisation.
The last of the detailed exegeses of the grain ele-
vator is in Erich Mendelsohn’s Amerika—Photobook
of an Architect, the document of a journey which
directly inspired Fritz Lang to create his film Metro-
polis. What makes this account distinct from all the
others which this introductory illustration analyses
is that Mendelsohn, a very successful architect with
a disposable income, actually travelled to see grain
elevators, and was then, as Banham puts it, ‘con-
fronted with the reality of his silo dreams’.19 He
saw, to a large degree, what he expected to see.
His descriptions of grain elevators depict them as a
teleological process, an advance towards a new
architecture out of chaos, still carrying a raw
charge from that chaotic emergence. His descrip-
tions underneath his photographs began with a
mere functional description of place and process,
with a clear and organic image with some twisted,
biomorphic pipes emerging as a rogue element.

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Yet, unlike Corbusier, he did not oppose the grain
elevator to the skyscraper cityscape’s ‘delirium’ (his
phrase). Instead, they are examples of a new kind
of delirious functionalism.
By the time Mendelsohn made it to Buffalo, the
images are clear but not airbrushed, edgy and
chaotic. We have ‘unplanned confusion; Monster
cranes with gestures of living creatures’ and ‘child-
hood forms, clumsy, full of primeval power dedi-
cated to purely practical needs. Primitive in their
functions of ingesting and spewing out again. (…)
a preliminary stage in a future world that is just
beginning to achieve order … an enormous organ-
ism … an expressiveness that corresponds to world
consumption’.20 To unpack this: for Mendelsohn,
like Ginzburg, the silos are ferocious and primal,
with an added biomorphic level of dirty, physical
and gastric metaphor; yet they are also steps on
the way to order. This order is seen achieved in the
photographs that follow, most of which are crops
and close-ups of particular architectural elements
in the silos: the forms have perfect clarity, their rude-
ness is harnessed; here, the much-vaunted sense
that the buildings were ‘legible’ is at its most appar-
ent, and the details especially show an abstract
beauty edging into the cold elegance of the Neue
Sachlichkeit; notably, the rhetorical flourishes cease
when he shows us the details.
These silo dreams and, in one case, silo experiences
are a collection of seemingly rather eccentric asser-
tions. The grain elevator sends us into the future
and back to ancient Egypt, it is serene and wildly
expressive, it is mechanical and monstrously corpor-
eal, it is a terrifying and uncontrollable organism
and the starting point for a new order, it is capitalist
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and it is the portent of the architecture of a socialist
future. All these accounts are massively, wildly and
thrillingly overdetermined, and all of them are from
Modernist architects. What happens, then, when
the silo dreams reappear in political propaganda, as
they do during the Soviets’ (heavily American-
assisted) first Five Year Plan?21
Soviet architects had been fixated with American
archetypes for some time, as documented by Ginz-
burg; SA or Sovremennaia Architektura (‘Contem-
porary Architecture’), the magazine he co-edited,
published in 1926 a proposal for a new Soviet silo
complex which would mesh together the
‘untrained’ extremism of the American silo with
the conscious aesthetics of Constructivism. There
are several other less obvious projects carrying
traces of silo photographs.22 Yet, more tellingly,
there were several images of grain silos used in
the huge propaganda campaign that accompanied
the first Five Year Plan, some of them visible in
the photomontage posters of Gustav Klutsis
(though the tectonically very similar bulging, cylind-
rical forms of blast furnaces were somewhat more
prevalent). There are, however, two images, which
were (in one case arguably) for foreign export and
show a direct transliteration of these silo dreams
into propagandist form. The first, ‘Builders of Social-
ism, Get the Latest News on the Great Project!
USSR in Construction for 1931’ is a poster for the
first issue of the magazine USSR In Construction, a
glossy, large-format and somewhat over-designed
periodical intended for a partly international audi-
ence, familiarising them with the apparent econ-
omic achievements of the apparent workers’ state
(Fig. 1).23
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Silo dreams: metamorphoses of the grain elevator

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Figure 1. Nikolai
Troshin, ‘USSR In
Construction for 1931’.

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The designer, Nikolai Troshin, uses a form of
almost cartoonish drawing, seemingly influenced
by the Constructivist poster designers Georgy and
Vladmir Stenberg. There are certainly major differ-
ences with the grainy reproductions in architectural
monographs: instead, as a promise of the luxuriously
packaged magazine it advertised, the poster is
marked by its bright colours, lurid yellows and
blues, with the silhouettes of blast furnaces
looming in the background of an industrial land-
scape, an image dynamically tilted to the left in the
manner of some of Mendelsohn’s silo photographs,
dramatically un-classical. There is one identifiable
real building, Ivan Zholtovsky’s power station in
central Moscow, but the largest structure is a grain
silo complex straight out of Buffalo, with—much
unlike the St Petersburg example built in 1913—sen-
sually curved cylinders all in their repetitive order.
Here, the ‘socialist America’ is apparently being
built, and the poster implores the (apparently
Soviet, in this instance, as the entire poster is in
Russian) passer-by to find out more about it.
Another, remarkably similar, image was produced
for an English-language Intourist brochure the fol-
lowing year, where blast furnaces and smokestacks
are silhouetted behind an even more clear and
proud image of a concrete grain elevator.24
In these two images, the dreams of ‘America’ are
precisely reimagined as the site of a super-industrial
socialism. Gropius and Corbusier praised American
engineers for eschewing the tendency to dress up
technology with direct historical reminiscences,
instead going straight for the primal heart of form:
these images promise an entire country built on
these terms. The image, although it is fundamentally
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similar in the English- and Russian-language ver-
sions, again means something different depending
on who is looking at it. To the Soviet audience, it
promises America, abundance and astonishing tech-
nological feats and leaps; to the English-language
audience it suggests a country which displays
rather than covers up its industrial nature, which
paradoxically means that they may in fact see in it
what Europeans saw twenty years earlier in press
clippings from American journals of structural engin-
eering. Whether it denotes something that would
have been described as ‘socialist’ twenty years
earlier is also moot; we are in the territory analysed
in 1936 by George Orwell, where socialism means
photographs of the ‘Dnieper Dam and the latest
salmon-canning factory in Moscow’25 rather than
liberty, equality and fraternity. Yet the structural
honesty, the vivid and unashamed industrial
display, the lack of irrationalist dressing, the lack of
centralisation (these are both dynamic, asymmetrical
images, without much hint of dominance) differen-
tiates this from the aesthetics of High Stalinism.
This style was anticipated in the early 1920s by the
Warsaw-born, St Petersburg-based poet Osip Man-
delstam, who wrote that a ‘social architecture’
could potentially warp into an aesthetic of power
and enslavement. His reference for this was the
same Egyptian architecture that Gropius saw
echoed in the form of the grain silo. ‘Social architec-
ture is measured against the scale of man. Some-
times it may turn against man to enhance its own
grandeur by feeding on his humiliation and insignif-
icance … Assyrian prisoners swarm like baby chicks
under the feet of an enormous king; warriors perso-
nifying the power of the state inimical to man kill
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Figure 2. Boris Klinch,

‘Mayday in Moscow’
(1936).

bound pygmies with long spears while Egyptians and
Egyptian builders treat the human mass as building
material in abundant supply, easily obtainable in
any quantity’. This ‘simple mechanical enormity and
naked quantity (is) inimical to man’. Instead of what
he describes as a ‘new social pyramid’, Mandelstam
calls for a ‘social Gothic’, which would entail the
free play of weights and forces, a human society con-
ceived as ‘a complex and dense architectural forest
wherein everything is efficient and individual, and
every detail answers to the conception of the
whole’.26 That the attempt to create such an architec-
ture failed, and an architecture of enormous forms
and domineering centralisation resulted, is clear
from a 1936 poster called ‘Mayday in Moscow’,
designed by Boris Klinch (Fig. 2).

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Here, Joseph Stalin is flanked on one side by
hulking concrete grain silos, with bags and bags
of grain; on the other by the dramatic Constructi-
vist Gosprom building in Kharkov, with a Metro
station nestled in between. Below Stalin is saluting
workers; above him, a fleet of aeroplanes. If the
grain elevator was redolent of Ancient
Egyptian architecture, here the silo has found its
Pharaoh.
Yet the image of the Pyramid had long haunted
the leftist avant-garde; it is everything they are
trying to avoid, to replace. In issue two of G, in Sep-
tember, 1923 (ie, on the eve of the abortive ‘German
October’), El Lissitzky’s extraordinary little piece,
‘Wheel-Propeller and What Will Follow—Our Form-
Production is a Function of Our System of Move-
ment’ makes this clear.27 His sketches show the
lines of movement of a man walking on the
ground; they form a pyramid through ‘the organic
energy of the human body’. The pyramid, ‘a moun-
tain of stones was piled above a colossal foun-
dation’, has the same form—it demonstrates, in
Lissitzky’s sketches, ’That is the Shape of the
walking human being’. New methods of industrial
construction, however, make this obsolete. The
pyramid is followed by the decentralised ‘shape of
the travelling human being’, which portends a
‘mobile architecture—the salon car, the sleeping
car, the dining car, the ocean steamer. The train is
a collective dwelling on wheels’.
In the final image, there is a tiny point; the triangu-
lar axes rise above it into space. Lissitzky explains:
‘Nauen: the 250-meter high antenna tower stands
on a single point. The Egyptian pyramid has been
overcome. The flying human being is at the limit.
485
The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 20
Number 3
At the limit of the old conceptions, the old form-cre-
ation, the old state of society. A new energy has to
be liberated that will give us a new system of move-
ment (for example, a movement that is not based on
friction, that provides an opportunity to hover in
space without moving). The new form-creation
must overcome the old machine that is merely an
imitation of the human hand. Only inventions will
move us further. Only inventions will determine
form-creation. Even for revolutions new forms
must be invented.’
For Lissitzky, the Egyptian pyramid is oppressive,
contra Mandelstam, precisely because of the fact
that it shows the imprint of the human scale,
because it replicates man’s movements before he
has invented the machines that will liberate him
from earthbound drudgery. His alternative is not a
‘social Gothic’—it is an abandonment of a fixed
architecture altogether, in favour of the ‘flying
human being’. And as we have seen, that is partially
fulfilled in the moving parts, the gargantuan ‘loose
legs’ of the grain silo itself. The silo is, then, an
image practically bursting with dialectics: bend the
stick in one direction and it is the weightless
architecture of a revolutionary future, another and
it is the new form of an ancient and dynastic
domination.
According to Banham’s account, Gropius had
partly based his idealisation of grain elevators on a
reading of Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and
Empathy. It is, then, very striking indeed that the
association between Egyptian and American archi-
tecture informs much of his argument in Egyptian
Art. Both countries, or rather Empires, are for Wor-
ringer marked by conservatism, artifice and timeless-
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Owen Hatherley
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ness, optimistic wonderlands without philosophy
and without doubt or depth. His account of Ameri-
can architecture is based on ‘industrial buildings, fac-
tories and grain elevators’ as opposed to the
‘imitation European styles’28 that could be found in
the USA’s official architectural culture. In them and
in Egyptian architecture there is a ‘sureness and
absoluteness of form’ that must not, at all costs,
be mistaken for profundity; rather, ‘the American
power of formation is lack of imagination’,29 and
so with Egypt. Both, for Worringer, are societies
that have a mass impulse, but not a collective
impulse, conformist and utterly conservative. What
is of interest to both is a faintly moronic obsession
with size, scale, abundance, whose physical power
is too often ascribed some deeper meaning. ‘The
elementary form exuberant with the natural luxur-
iance of the idea of size, the American form a cold
representative megalomania, the whole imposing
splendour of which serves at bottom only to cloak
an emptiness of ideas under “record” manifes-
tations of materialism’.30
The latter point is strangely familiar, not so much
for American civilisation, but that of the Soviet Union
from the 1930s onwards. A fixation with gigantism,
with megalomaniac constructions that reveal them-
selves on close inspection to be thin, dark and
cramped, and most of all with record-breaking;
with prodigious outputs of steel irrespective of its
usefulness, on several attempts to build the tallest
building in the world, eventually fulfilled for less
than a decade in the form of Moscow’s Ostankino
Tower as late as 1967. It is a fixation with sheer
quantity, irrespective of quality. Thus, needless mon-
umentalism and an arrogance and essential shallow-
ness link all three for Worringer. This does not seem
to apply to the silo dreams of the 1920s, where the
objects in question inspire responses that are live
with political and intellectual ideas; but, come the
Stalin era, the return to grandeur entails an inadver-
tent return to just this vacuity, as can be seen in the
emptily optimistic, Pharaonic image of power in
Klinch’s Mayday poster. Worringer prefaces his argu-
ment with the statement directed at contemporary
art critics that ‘what you regard as the ultimate meta-
physic of form is merely the Americanism which
otherwise you so much despise’.31 With respect to
Stalinism, we can reverse this. What is taken to be
the form for an eternal and universal ‘socialist’
Empire is in fact the kitsch of commercialism with
an overlay of irrationalism, what Worringer describes
in the Pyramids as ‘the juxtaposition of Americanism
and occultism’.32
In the process, we have come a long way from
the image of a ‘concrete Atlantis’ fantasised over
by a small group of German and French architects,
into an area where aesthetics and politics cross
over in deeply uncomfortable ways, and where
the meanings of a ferro-concrete building are over-
loaded with utopian and dystopian content. For all
that, the transformation that has occurred in the
image of the concrete grain silo actually brings
us back to some of the more peculiar, less ration-
alist aspects of the original cult of these forms in
the Werkbund and with the Paris purists such as
Le Corbusier. This might then suggest that their
own concrete architecture has running beneath it
an undercurrent of social dreaming, irrationality
and monumentality that is, for the most part,
disavowed.

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What has happened in this shift is a return in a
new form of the ideas originally projected onto the
grain silo by European architects. From early on,
Gropius, and then even more so, Le Corbusier, saw
the silo as an image not so much of mere progress,
but of eternal and elemental form—a Platonism
derived in part from the example of ancient Egypt.
As Banham stresses, this comes partly from the aes-
thetic theory of Worringer, but wholly at variance
with the interpretation that Worringer will later
give to this aesthetic comparison: ie, that both the
silo and the pyramid are images of a fairly vacuous
power, fundamentally meaningless and banal. In
this, Worringer was in agreement with those Soviet
architectural thinkers who worried about the pro-
spect of a ‘pyramidal’ form of power becoming the
expression of a hierarchical society. It is arguable
that this was expressed in the Soviet Union in the
1930s, when, after the dispossession of the peasan-
try, the silo was used as an image of the alleged
effects of that dispossession—that is, the abundance
contained within the silo, the piles of grain within its
concrete walls. That this would coincide, in 1933,
with famine on a huge scale, is a reminder that
this is an image of abundance, hardly a reality.
However, in the examples of Erich Mendelsohn
and particularly Moisei Ginzburg, this very same
piece of industrial architecture is imagined not as
oppressive, looming and eternal, but as a moving,
jagged and complex piece of montaged anti-archi-
tecture. Within that tension, within the interpret-
ation of this single concrete form, is contained
much of the dialectic of the modern movement in
the Soviet Union, between images of emancipatory
technology and industrial despotism.
487
The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 20
Number 3
Notes and references
1. Alexander Wat, My Century (New York, NYRB Classics,
2003), p.67
2. Reyner Banham, A Concrete Atlantis—US Industrial
Building and European Modernist Architecture (Cam-
bridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1989), p. 256. The
culprit is Vincent Scully.
3. Annemarie Jaeggi, Fagus—Industrial Culture from
Werkbund to Bauhaus (New York, Princeton Architec-
tural Press, 2000), p. 49.
4. Ibid., p.50
5. R. Banham, A Concrete Atlantis, op. cit., pp. 198–9
6. Ibid., p. 202. Banham attributes this move to Gropius’
readings of Wilhelm Worringer and Alois Reigl.
7. Ibid., p.154.
8. For an account of the role of doctored photographs
and victor’s history in the modern movement, see
Crimson Architectural Historians, Mart Stam’s Trou-
sers, by Michael Speaks, Gerard Hadders; C. Wilkins,
ed. (Rotterdam, Crimson/010 Publishers, 1999).
9. The retouching process is documented in R. Banham, A
Concrete Atlantis, op. cit., p. 219.
10. Ibid., p. 223.
11. Ibid., p. 224.
12. Ibid., p. 17.
13. Moisei Ginzburg, Style and Epoch (Cambridge, Mass.,
The MIT Press, 1982), p. 96.
14. Ibid., p. 108.
15. Ibid., p. 116.
16. Ibid., p. 46.
17. It is profiled in B.M Kirkov, M.S Stieglitz, Leningrad Avant-
Garde Architecture (St Petersburg, 2009), pp. 47–50.
18. See Alan M Ball, Imagining America—Influences and
Images in Twentieth-Century Russia (Oxford, Rowman
& Littlefield, 2003).
19. R. Banham, A Concrete Atlantis, op. cit., p. 143.
20. Erich Mendelsohn, Amerika (Toronto, Dover Publi-
cations,1993; orig. 1926), pp. 44–5.
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21. On the overwhelming involvement of American firms
in the first Five Year Plan, see the many contracts,
deals, exports and imports catalogued in A. M. Ball,
Imagining America, op. cit., chapters four and five.
22. One of the most interesting possible silo-derived struc-
tures is Konstantin Melnikov’s Soviet Pavilion at the
Paris Exposition of 1925. ’Two professors at Indiana
University thought that the Pavilion resembled
“a grain elevator” and that “its dual symbolism
attained expression in the form of hard blocks, repre-
senting the peasants and workmen of the thirty (sic)
Soviet republics”’. Myroslava M Mudrak, Virginia
Hagelstein Marquardt, ’Environments of Propaganda:
Russian and Soviet Expositions and Pavilions in the
West’, in, The Avant-Garde Frontier (Gainesville, FL,
University Press of Florida, 1992), p. 79.
23. Reproduced in David King, Red Star Over Russia
(London, Tate Publishing, 2008), p. 223.
24. Tours to USSR 1932, from the Cicely Osmond collec-
tion of the Society for Co-Operation in Russian and
Soviet Studies, London.
25. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (Harmonds-
worth, Penguin Classics, 2001), p. 203.
26. Osip Mandelstam, ’Humanism and the Present’ (1923),
in, Carl R Proffer, Ellenda Proffer, Ronald Meyer, Mary
Ann Szporluk, eds, Russian Literature in the Twenties
(Ann Arbor, Ardis, 1987), pp. 519–20.
27. The issue is reproduced in full in G—An Avant Garde
Journal of Art, Architecture, Design and Film (Los
Angeles, 2010).
28. Wilhelm Worringer, Egyptian Art (London, 1928),
p. 23.
29. Ibid., p. 24.
30. Ibid., p. 48.
31. Ibid., p. X.
32. Ibid., p. 56.