THE EIFFEL TOWERS OF BUFFALO

Are the grain elevators the Eiffel Towers of Buffalo? These monstrous concrete silos along the Niagara River were built in the nineteenth century to collect and store grain as it was shipped throughout the country. They are higher than the city’s office towers and longer than its blocks.

The elevators have the careless grace of structures that grew from need rather than pride, and were engineered rather than designed. They are bare in form. Their silos are poured concrete, their headhouses red brick or corrugated steel. They are brutal in scale. They dwarf the modest residential neighborhoods behind them so dramatically that they feel, from the street, like apparitions, pictures hanging in the air.

Perhaps the grain elevators are more properly thought of as machines than as buildings. Inside there are retractable chutes that can siphon grain from ships and then pour it into others. In patent drawings describing their workings, they look like insects, packed with folding limbs and tubes, and interconnected chambers.

In A Concrete Atlantis, Reyner Banham compares the inside of the Great Northern grain elevator to “the abandoned cathedral of some sect of iron men." These structures, mostly abandoned, have a gorgeous ruined feeling. Yet they survive intact and rule the city, presiding over its rivers. Can they be left in place, just as they are, for centuries more?

November 08, 2014 by Nalina Moses

BOOK LEARNING

My first college art history course was a survey that covered all of Western achievement, from scratchings on cave walls to video installations. The syllabus focused on paintings and sculptures, with a handful of buildings from each era thrown in, to broaden the perspective. One of them was the Guaranty Building in Buffalo by Louis Sullivan, from 1896. I can still remember the small, square, black and white picture of it, not much larger than a postage stamp, in my textbook. And I can recall the reasons we learned that the building was, for its time, so remarkable: its steel frame, its impressive height, and the strong vertical rhythms of its facades. I’ve kept this image of this building with me for decades.

So it was a surprise, when visiting Buffalo for the first time, to see that the Guaranty Building is dressed in thick terra-cotta tiles the color of an uncooked, unwashed sweet potato. And to see that each of these tiles is cast with a dense filigree of twisting vines, leaves and blossoms, rendered with both Celtic and classical accents. And to see that the building overpowers: it stands, sternly, squarish, twenty-three stories high and half a block wide, on a prominent corner downtown. It’s brutal mass and angelic surface serve up dual, flickering identities. No longer a monument trapped in a photograph, the building is, now, for me, a complex, living thing.

Photograph by dIPENdAVE.

November 05, 2014 by Nalina Moses

INTO THE GROUND

From the outside, the Darwin Martin House (DMH) in Buffalo might be the most lyrical of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie Style homes. It’s a lovely bundle of low-lying horizontals: brick walls, concrete railings, ribbon windows, and overhanging eaves, that seems to hover above the flat lawn. In its composition it feels more relaxed, and refined, than even more celebrated Wright works like the Robie House.

But the house’s interiors are something different. The rooms on the ground floor (entrance, living room, sitting room and dining room) are set in a dense, interlocking plan around two large freestanding brick fireplaces. There are no doors or archways to mark the boundaries between the rooms, only wood beams and shifting heights in the ceilings. These ceilings are set low, so low that someone six feet tall would have trouble moving from one to the next.

The walls are all finished with a gold-tinted plaster. And they are trimmed with wood bases at the bottom, wood frames at the corners, and wood coves at the top. What plaster surfaces that remain are encrusted with wood display niches, bookcases, radiator covers, and window seats. Overhead, the ceilings and beams are also trimmed in wood. All this heavy woodwork – in teak with a heavy grain, stained the color of tea – weighs the space down. And when one moves to the windows for relief one can’t see beyond their intricate stained glass panels and the deep eaves to the sky. So one’s view remains pinned low, to the horizon.

It was one of Wright’s commandments to build into the ground rather than on the ground. And one typically finds inside a Wright house, like Robie House, a protected, burrowed feeling. But at DMH one finds instead a sense of compression, as if one is being pressed into the ground. This is an uncommon Frank Lloyd Wright house. Rather than a dynamic, fluid interior, it offers one that’s tangled, and overbearing.

Photograph courtesy of Darwin Martin Complex.

November 04, 2014 by Nalina Moses

ACT II

I wrote earlier this year about a project to turn the Richardson Olmsted Complex (ROC), a former asylum in Buffalo designed by the legendary nineteenth-century architect Henry Hobson Richardson, into a hotel and convention center. The project’s developers and designers are talented and inspired, and working hard to do what’s best for the city. But as I researched and wrote the piece I understood that the whole endeavor was, in one sense, a typical gentrification project. The ROC is taking a historic property, obscuring its original purpose, retaining what’s notable about its architecture (in this case: rough stone facades, super-wide hallways, high gable roofs), and increasing its value. And the transformation in program – from mental hospital to boutique hotel – invites satire.

But after visiting the ROC this summer, seeing the grounds, and walking through some of the buildings, I feel differently. The hospital complex was abandoned after the 1960’s, as more and more mental patients were treated as out-patients, and its wards fell into disuse. Since then its buildings have been weather-sealed and structurally stabilized, but they remain dramatically dishevelled: emptied of furnishings, with paint peeling in tendrils from the ceilings, rubble piled in corners, and, in some rooms, fire-scarred walls. The rooms carry incredible sadness. That’s not only in remembering the lives that passed sequestered inside, but in seeing how the facilities remain unused.

The ORC is an immense property, with nine individual structures and a property about the size of four city blocks. Its buildings have magnificent (i.e. Richardsonian) proportions, generous daylight, and stunning landscaping, and they’re literally turning to dust. It’s something of a miracle that they weren’t destroyed earlier, and that the property wasn’t redeveloped as a subdivision or a mall. Making these buildings habitable once again is a monstrous undertaking, not for the faint-hearted, or the cynical. It’s an act of gentrification, and an act of hope.

Photograph by Christopher Payne.

November 03, 2014 by Nalina Moses