Silo Dreams: The Industrial Inspirations of the Modern Movement

Writing in the yearbook of the German Werkbund in 1913, Walter Gropius hailed America’s industrial architecture, declaring that its factory buildings “almost bear comparison with the buildings of Ancient Egypt.”¹ His essay encouraged fellow architects to abandon traditional ornamentation in favor of “clear contrasts, orderly articulation in the arrangement of every part, and unity of form and color.”² Gropius’s praise made him one of the first European architects to write about American industrial architecture. But even more than his writing, it was the seven pages of photos of grain silos and factories published along with his text—and their wide circulation—that prompted a radical shift in European architecture and the rise of what is now known as the Modern Movement.

Gropius’s contribution to the Werkbund’s publication, however unassuming in appearance, is the conceptual engine of Architecture in the Age of Industry. While the photos’ precise origins are murky, evidence suggests that Gropius assembled them from a range of sources—newspapers, trade magazines, friends, colleagues—over at least a year. The images, in turn, took on new lives after their publication in Gropius’s article. German architect Erich Mendelsohn included one of the images in one of his own articles, and in 1924 visited the American grain silos himself, fulfilling his so-called “silo dreams.”³ French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier edited and republished a selection of the photos in several volumes of his journal L’Esprit Nouveau, and then again in his Vers une architecture—which would become one of the last century’s most significant books on architecture. The photos continued to be circulated as examples of American modernity into the 1920s and as late as the 1960s.

Scholar Michael Faciejew suggests that these labor conditions may be why American factories were not as appealing to American architects.⁵ Seen at a distance through the European imagination, America was the poster child for innovation and machine-age triumph—in Gropius’s words, the “motherland of industry.”⁶ It was only the American engineer or industrial architect—supposedly untainted by the historical nostalgia that plagued Europeans—who could arrive at a form of design unadulterated by the burden of the past. As Le Corbusier scrawled beneath his own simplified sketch of classical temples in 1929, ceci n’est pas l’architecture (This is not architecture).

The industrial origins of the Modern Movement is a story that has never been told at MoMA, despite the fact that the term “International Style”—the name by which most of the European architects’ buildings in the exhibition are best known—was coined at a MoMA exhibition in 1932. The gallery draws in particular from the Museum’s expansive Mies van der Rohe Archive and the Department of Architecture and Design’s photo collection; many of the gallery’s objects are on view for the first time.