“To those who travel the great highways of the Midwest, silos appear like cathedrals, and in fact they are the cathedrals of our times. Their materials impose the rhythms of this book - wood, brick, tile, steel, concrete - and they mark the passage of time, the slow evolution of a collective work.”
The Great Plains of America are vast, and secret are its villages turned inward on their religious sects and antique languages, as if time had stood still. These people were not seeking America, but were escaping from Europe, and in these first wooden silos there is a memory of, and an obsession with, architecture from different parts of central Europe. Over time the silos rose with ever greater assurance and created the landscape of the New World. In abandoning the problem of form, they rediscovered architecture.
From out of the gray landscape of publications on architecture emerges this book that searches for something authentic and definitive. Lisa Mahar analyzes these architectures typologically and in terms of their constructional systems, disguising the secret of their allure. Her photographs, taken as she followed the route of the pioneers are like black and white etchings. we are struck by the purity of the geometries, the clarity of the construction, the relationship with the landscape. And yet the author’s photographs also speak to us at another level: the sky, the shadows, the composition simultaneously reveal and conceal the beauty that we seek.
Somehow the book makes me think of James Joyce, and not just because the author is of Irish decent, but because of the way the landscape appears and disappears within the story. In photographs of the elevator in the landscape, we find the fresco of the American countryside constructed of a few essential items: the grain elevator, a few trees and telephone poles give us a scene much like the profiles of the hills in the films of John Ford.
Lisa Mahar has located something that perhaps even she did not expect to find: architecture. In these times of so much mediocrity I rediscover a faith that at times I feel I have lost. This small book teaches us that despite everything, even our profession can participate in the search for the truth.”
Aldo Rossi, New York, November 1992