“When the Tidewater Elevator comes down, Philadelphia will not only lose a vestige of its relatively short-lived history as a collection, storage, and distribution point for grain but also an austere piece of architectural history arguably of international significance. As architectural historian Reyner Banham has pointed out in his Concrete Atlantis, European architects like Le Corbusier and Gropius looked upon an American landscape littered with elevators, as ‘the monumental vernacular of the 20th century’ and were smitten by the no-nonsense frankness of these structures’ precise geometrical forms.”
via The Necessity for Ruins, a no-nonsense treatise on Philadelphia’s architectural relics… and quite a nice one at that.
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