Caveat Emptor

On the outskirts of the small town in Montana where I grew up is an abandoned complex of industrial buildings: ten silos roughly seven stories in height, a mottled grain elevator clad in steel panels of varying patina, and a shorter brick factory of about five floors. Stretching away from the architectural assembly is a low three-level structure whose parapet steps down in a rhythmic legato along the building’s length.

I could never quite put my finger on the quality that drew me in, though its genius loci was undeniable: a steep hillside with scrubby sage and tall grasses, faded tarmac flowing smoothly around the silos’ bases, and across the road a dusty spur of dirt where a livestock auction house stood. The silence of dead August heat. Perhaps I was drawn to a thing forgotten in plain sight; the area was well camouflaged by mundanity. Rusted out jalopies crouched between the silos with grass sprigs pushing through holes in their wheel wells; a chainlink fence installed as an afterthought, lazily sagging around the lot’s perimeter; piles of railway ties soaked in creosote waiting patiently for some unknown use. It only took a few simple accoutrements to make the obvious invisible.

Nevertheless, the arrangement is one of my favorite architectural essays. Functional, concise, and organized. There’s no intellectual or academic firewall. No convoluted explanation. No rhetoric. It is a building designed with a clear purpose constructed using recognizable materials for workers with a tangible profession. It is a sculptural receptacle derived from head pressures, flow rates, and yield limits. Grain elevators exude a comforting familiarity in their humanely industrial scale and sophisticated simplicity. Big, but not too big. Complex, but discernibly so.

Despite my earlier assertion that the grain elevator requires no academic pedigree to appreciate, its trajectory within the canon of modern architectural discourse should not be overlooked. Le Corbusier places them as the backdrop for an entire chapter describing the importance of mass and geometric simplicity in Towards a New Architecture ¹ . Decades later, John Hejduk would combine twin effigies of the grain elevator in his proposal for a botanical garden in Compostela, and a decade after that Peter Eisenman would revive this idea to be included as a folly within the City of Culture in Galicia. In more recent years, Peter Zumthor’s ‘Meelfabriek’ development uses a flour factory as a focal point ffor urban renewal in Leiden.

Returning home to Montana after three years in New Haven, I found that the grain elevator I’d always admired held up. It hadn’t changed, but I had. I had developed a frame of reference shaped less by the privileges of travel week than by New Haven itself.

New Haven is a unique crucible where anomalous architecture and eclectic urban conditions abound. For the curious cyclist or observant flaneur it is an endless text of contradictions and juxtapositions. It could be a site for creative studio briefs for years to come—provided instructors were familiar with the area.

But the osmotic sphere of academic architecture is a selective filter. It prioritizes grand tours over day trips, raising questions of academic imperialism, carbon contribution, and saviour complex while placating students with electives deconstructing the very same things.

Nothing is perfect.

Travel week may have its shortcomings, but it wouldn’t be Yale without it. By extension, the lottery, though convoluted and excruciating, teaches a critical lesson: perspective is a faustian bargain.

Caveat emptor.