Seeds of Concrete Progress: Grain Elevators and Technology Transfer between America and Australia

Abstract

Modern concrete silos and grain elevators are a persistent source of interest and fascination for architects, industrial archaeologists, painters, photographers, and artists. The legacy of the Australian examples of the early 1900s is appreciated primarily by a popular culture that allocates value to these structures on aesthetic grounds. Several aspects of construction history associated with this early modern form of civil engineering have been less explored. In the 1920s and 1930s, concrete grain elevator stations blossomed along the railway networks of the Australian Wheat Belts, marking with their vertical presence the landscapes of many rural towns in New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria, and Western Australia. The Australian reception of this industrial building type of American origin reflects the modern nation-building aspirations of State Governments of the early 1900s. The development of fast-tracked, self-climbing methods for constructing concrete silos, a technology also imported from America, illustrates the critical role of concrete in that effort of nation-building. The rural and urban proliferation of concrete silos in Australia also helped establish a confident local concrete industry that began thriving with automatic systems of movable formwork, mastering and ultimately transferring these construction methods to multi-storey buildings after WWII. Although there is an evident link between grain elevators and the historiographical propaganda of heroic modernism, that nexus should not induce to interpret old concrete silos as a vestige of modern aesthetics. As catalysts of technical and economic development in Australia, Australian wheat silos also bear important significance due to the international technology transfer and local repercussions of their fast-tracked concrete construction methods.