Walter Gropius’s silos and Reyner Banham’s grain elevators as art-objects

In Reyner Banham’s slide collection are numerous photographs of his visits during the 1970s and 1980s to grain elevators in the USA and Canada. They are archived and catalogued alongside his own photographs of others from the early twentieth century, including the image Walter Gropius used to first introduce the now iconic North and South American silos into architectural discourse in his 1911 lecture ‘Monumentale Kunst und Industriebau’ (Monumental Art and Industrial Building). Together these images provide an account through photography of Banham’s return to these canonical buildings (Figure 3.1). They allow us to question Gropius’s and Banham’s deliberate choice of photographic representations, and to explore their (apparently) different use of photography as a vehicle to introduce ordinary and vernacular industrial buildings as art-objects worthy of architectural attention.