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From the Globe:
Our very own Roman amphitheatres
Despite this week's proposal by the TWRC (a silo-top restaurant!), Toronto seems to have given up on its grain elevators.
By JOHN BENTLEY MAYS
Special to The Globe and Mail
Saturday, March 13, 2004 - Page M3
Of the architectural proposals for the harbour lands unveiled this week by the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation, none is more striking than the scheme for the Canada Malting grain elevators that now stand at the northeastern corner of the bay: The ensemble of great cylindrical bins, built in 1944 by Toronto businessman E. P. Taylor and now derelict, becomes the tall base of a new building constructed in the sky -- a restaurant, perhaps, or a conference centre, or simply a new platform for viewing the sweep of the Lake Ontario shoreline and the glitter of downtown towers.
There is no guarantee, of course, that the TWRC plan for the silos will turn into reality, or come true soon enough to save the elevators. Public patience with the TWRC's $17-billion renewal notions is running thin and could evaporate entirely if the Crown agency does not quickly build or bulldoze something big on the land currently occupied by empty grain elevators and other antiquated port facilities.
It seems only a matter of time before the silos -- the greatest survivors from the city's glory days as a Great Lakes port -- fall victim to the vogue for living, playing and working downtown, which has created strong arguments for wrecking the silos and throwing open their sites to residential, recreational and commercial development.
But what's really novel in this unfolding story is the notable absence of crusaders determined to stop the tear-down. As recently as the 1980s, when public enthusiasm for North America's industrial heritage spiked, architects, community activists and editorial writers mounted large, popular campaigns to save tottering factories, dilapidated mills and abandoned silos.
Admiring remarks about grain elevators by modernist architectural theorist Le Corbusier -- whose ideas were otherwise widely ridiculed in the late 20th century -- were piously recycled in the save-the-silos press. Proposals for converting rust-belt grain elevators into hotels or condominium towers got good media play, and a handful of makeovers were actually accomplished. (Among frequently cited reuses: the conversion of 14 huge cylindrical buildings, in 1982, into a 2.3-hectare condominium development in the Minneapolis neighbourhood of Calhoun Isles, and the 1983 transformation of 36 grain silos into the Hilton Inn at Quaker Square, in Akron, Ohio.)
To many observers, the plain, powerful geometry of grain elevators has long represented a broad-shouldered counterpoint, worth preserving, to the increasingly glassy, high-tech appearance of cities.
Nowadays, news of an impending silo destruction, at least in Toronto, is more likely to be greeted with a resigned sigh than a cry of outrage. This comes as no surprise to Buffalo urbanist Lynda Schneekloth, who has been studying and fighting for her town's industrial buildings since the 1980s. "The biggest difference between Buffalo and Toronto is that in Toronto, you have huge pressure for development, so all the urban land is precious," Ms. Schneekloth said.
"In Buffalo, the land is not required right now, which gives us wonderful opportunities. Also, we have 17 major elevators in Buffalo. They're not isolated artifacts. There's a family of them. But even in Toronto [where there are fewer silos], just having them there makes the waterfront different from any other place in the world." (Toronto has two derelict elevator complexes still standing on its inner harbour.)
Though once considered a viable option for some old elevators, conversion has few advocates now, even among heritage-minded planners at work on Toronto's waterfront revival. Redoing a silo from the inside out is "extremely difficult, complicated, expensive, and not many buildings lend themselves to reuse," said urban planner and TWRC consultant Pino Di Mascio.
An alternative destiny for dead silos under consideration by the TWRC is to use them for waste-water storage -- a fate that has also been considered in Buffalo but has not been proved feasible. Another is to allow them to stand empty, as monuments to the ambitions of an earlier age, perhaps with a restaurant or conference centre dropped on top. In Buffalo, silos have been used as screens for showing old movies, while in Montreal they have been turned into echo chambers for musical performances.
"Heritage, yes," Mr. Di Mascio said. "It may be possible to find ways to interpret what happened there. If you can keep it, that's great. But I have no sense that the elevators [on land being planned by the TWRC] are important."
It's a sentiment shared by Alfredo Romano, a Toronto real-estate developer who owns the Canada Malting silos at the northeastern extent of the inner harbour. Grain elevators, he said, "are difficult to reuse as habitation of any kind, due to the thickness of the walls. They are absolutely so heavy and cumbersome, there's nothing that can be done with them. I have yet to see [a conversion] that works."
A "small portion, perhaps 10 per cent," of a Toronto elevator complex could be allowed to survive as a fragment of urban memory, like a ruin. "It would recall the heritage. It's possible to do something spectacular with it, with the volumes and spaciousness of the footprint."
But the grain silos' best protection from total demolition is neither their beauty nor their historical interest. Rather, it's what makes them so resistant to reuse: the immense physical strength of their steel-reinforced concrete walls.
The familiar silhouette of the cylindrical grain elevator began to rise beside North American rivers and the Great Lakes a century ago, as a practical response to the peculiar physical properties of grain. Loose grain presses down with the force of any solid substance, but it also pushes outward like water or oil. The invention of reinforced concrete in mid-Victorian times provided the technical means necessary for containing these downward and lateral forces within a structure that took up relatively little space on the ground. When you're that strong, you don't have to be pretty or historically interesting to survive.
Toronto architect George Baird, whose firm has studied reuse opportunities offered by grain elevators, recalls the recent rip-down of a Toronto grain-storage silo that took a year and $1.2-million to complete, and drove the demolition company into bankruptcy.
"They are almost indestructible," Mr. Baird said. "We should leave them alone, like Roman amphitheatres. Maybe someone will think of something to do with them a hundred years from now."
GB
Our very own Roman amphitheatres
Despite this week's proposal by the TWRC (a silo-top restaurant!), Toronto seems to have given up on its grain elevators.
By JOHN BENTLEY MAYS
Special to The Globe and Mail
Saturday, March 13, 2004 - Page M3
Of the architectural proposals for the harbour lands unveiled this week by the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation, none is more striking than the scheme for the Canada Malting grain elevators that now stand at the northeastern corner of the bay: The ensemble of great cylindrical bins, built in 1944 by Toronto businessman E. P. Taylor and now derelict, becomes the tall base of a new building constructed in the sky -- a restaurant, perhaps, or a conference centre, or simply a new platform for viewing the sweep of the Lake Ontario shoreline and the glitter of downtown towers.
There is no guarantee, of course, that the TWRC plan for the silos will turn into reality, or come true soon enough to save the elevators. Public patience with the TWRC's $17-billion renewal notions is running thin and could evaporate entirely if the Crown agency does not quickly build or bulldoze something big on the land currently occupied by empty grain elevators and other antiquated port facilities.
It seems only a matter of time before the silos -- the greatest survivors from the city's glory days as a Great Lakes port -- fall victim to the vogue for living, playing and working downtown, which has created strong arguments for wrecking the silos and throwing open their sites to residential, recreational and commercial development.
But what's really novel in this unfolding story is the notable absence of crusaders determined to stop the tear-down. As recently as the 1980s, when public enthusiasm for North America's industrial heritage spiked, architects, community activists and editorial writers mounted large, popular campaigns to save tottering factories, dilapidated mills and abandoned silos.
Admiring remarks about grain elevators by modernist architectural theorist Le Corbusier -- whose ideas were otherwise widely ridiculed in the late 20th century -- were piously recycled in the save-the-silos press. Proposals for converting rust-belt grain elevators into hotels or condominium towers got good media play, and a handful of makeovers were actually accomplished. (Among frequently cited reuses: the conversion of 14 huge cylindrical buildings, in 1982, into a 2.3-hectare condominium development in the Minneapolis neighbourhood of Calhoun Isles, and the 1983 transformation of 36 grain silos into the Hilton Inn at Quaker Square, in Akron, Ohio.)
To many observers, the plain, powerful geometry of grain elevators has long represented a broad-shouldered counterpoint, worth preserving, to the increasingly glassy, high-tech appearance of cities.
Nowadays, news of an impending silo destruction, at least in Toronto, is more likely to be greeted with a resigned sigh than a cry of outrage. This comes as no surprise to Buffalo urbanist Lynda Schneekloth, who has been studying and fighting for her town's industrial buildings since the 1980s. "The biggest difference between Buffalo and Toronto is that in Toronto, you have huge pressure for development, so all the urban land is precious," Ms. Schneekloth said.
"In Buffalo, the land is not required right now, which gives us wonderful opportunities. Also, we have 17 major elevators in Buffalo. They're not isolated artifacts. There's a family of them. But even in Toronto [where there are fewer silos], just having them there makes the waterfront different from any other place in the world." (Toronto has two derelict elevator complexes still standing on its inner harbour.)
Though once considered a viable option for some old elevators, conversion has few advocates now, even among heritage-minded planners at work on Toronto's waterfront revival. Redoing a silo from the inside out is "extremely difficult, complicated, expensive, and not many buildings lend themselves to reuse," said urban planner and TWRC consultant Pino Di Mascio.
An alternative destiny for dead silos under consideration by the TWRC is to use them for waste-water storage -- a fate that has also been considered in Buffalo but has not been proved feasible. Another is to allow them to stand empty, as monuments to the ambitions of an earlier age, perhaps with a restaurant or conference centre dropped on top. In Buffalo, silos have been used as screens for showing old movies, while in Montreal they have been turned into echo chambers for musical performances.
"Heritage, yes," Mr. Di Mascio said. "It may be possible to find ways to interpret what happened there. If you can keep it, that's great. But I have no sense that the elevators [on land being planned by the TWRC] are important."
It's a sentiment shared by Alfredo Romano, a Toronto real-estate developer who owns the Canada Malting silos at the northeastern extent of the inner harbour. Grain elevators, he said, "are difficult to reuse as habitation of any kind, due to the thickness of the walls. They are absolutely so heavy and cumbersome, there's nothing that can be done with them. I have yet to see [a conversion] that works."
A "small portion, perhaps 10 per cent," of a Toronto elevator complex could be allowed to survive as a fragment of urban memory, like a ruin. "It would recall the heritage. It's possible to do something spectacular with it, with the volumes and spaciousness of the footprint."
But the grain silos' best protection from total demolition is neither their beauty nor their historical interest. Rather, it's what makes them so resistant to reuse: the immense physical strength of their steel-reinforced concrete walls.
The familiar silhouette of the cylindrical grain elevator began to rise beside North American rivers and the Great Lakes a century ago, as a practical response to the peculiar physical properties of grain. Loose grain presses down with the force of any solid substance, but it also pushes outward like water or oil. The invention of reinforced concrete in mid-Victorian times provided the technical means necessary for containing these downward and lateral forces within a structure that took up relatively little space on the ground. When you're that strong, you don't have to be pretty or historically interesting to survive.
Toronto architect George Baird, whose firm has studied reuse opportunities offered by grain elevators, recalls the recent rip-down of a Toronto grain-storage silo that took a year and $1.2-million to complete, and drove the demolition company into bankruptcy.
"They are almost indestructible," Mr. Baird said. "We should leave them alone, like Roman amphitheatres. Maybe someone will think of something to do with them a hundred years from now."
GB