Silo Dreams Mountainous silos, incredibly space-conscious, but creating space. A random confusion amidst the chaos of loading and unloading corn ships, of railways and bridges, crane monsters with live gestures, hordes of silo cells in concrete, stone and glazed brick. Then suddenly a silo with administrative buildings, closed horizontal fronts against the stupendous verticals of fifty to a hundred cylinders, and all this in the sharp evening light. I took photographs like mad. Everything else so far now seemed to have been shaped interim to my silo dreams. Everything else was merely a beginning. —Erich Mendelsohn 4 The case study site is the landmark Victory Soya Mills on Toronto’s waterfront. While modernists such as Mendelsohn, Gropius, Corbusier and Behrens gravitated towards these industrial typologies for their functional and monumental nature, we enlist the silo typology solely because of its impenetrable walls. The silo is emblematic here – a controlled interior storage space that ignores any transformations in the exterior climate. While most
buildings are constructed to resist large exterior lateral loads, silos are one of the few types capable of enduring great lateral loads from within. As a result, industrial silos produce a zero baseline relationship to weather – an ideal challenge and point of departure. How might one transform these iconic buildings along the waterfront so that they can respond, educate and transform with weather? As Toronto, like many North American cities, struggles to (re)develop its waterfront, what role can these monumental industrial buildings play in its development? As we enter a time of energy scarcity, we must question how we can create an atmospheric architecture that renegotiates the fundamental relationship between architecture and weather. * 1 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. IPPC Fourth Assessment Report. Climate Change 2007: Mitigation of Climate Change. 2007. pp259 & 392 2 Ibid., pp259 & 393 3 Ibid., p391 4 Mendelsohn, Letters of an Architect (edited by Oscar Beyer, 1967, p69), quoted in Banham, Renyer. A Concrete Atlantis: U.S Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture 1900-1925 . Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986. p7
ThermArium, designed by: Daniel Rabin and Annie Ritz The Thermarium explores how CSOs from heavy rainfalls can be converted into a productive element in the city. Conceived as a water purification facility, the Thermarium exploits the output of sedimentation as a building material that accumulates due to rain, and slowly forms an urban beach along the Toronto Waterfront.
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weather matters: On Site review 21
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