Just the other day a couple of us were staring at the grain elevators and silos, wondering what the process would be like to convert them to dwellings. I know that it has been done before in other cities, but the task appears daunting considering the scope of the project, the building materials (concrete and more concrete), the money, the historic nature of the structures, and of course finding the visionary who can pull it off.
Just this morning, a friend sent me these images from Copenhagen. Although this is an entirely different way to go about reusing a grain silo, I thought that the development was rather striking and forward thinking. Instead of building apartments inside the silos, developers were using them as a structural core upon which to build out from. There will be some who feel that this misses the point and that by covering them up the historic and industrial nature of the elevators are sacrificed. The flip side is that if you don’t come up with a practical use for the architectural monuments, they may altogether disappear one day. Remember HO Oats? The interior of the silos houses massive atrium spaces, stairways, elevators and mechanicals.