Yale Architecture Forum
Ateya Khorakiwala
Granularities: Concrete and the “Gray Architecture” of Grain Storage in 1960s and 70s India
In India in the 1960s and 1970s, civil engineers recommended and designed reinforced concrete thin shell warehouses to absorb the unpredictable excesses of grain production from the so-called Green Revolution. At the same time, agricultural economists recommended reinforced concrete silos as technologies to store food grains as a mode of famine protection to fortify the economy from unpredictable scarcities. As such, a kind of science of grain storage developed (largely around wheat, but also rice), and a “gray architecture” consisting of warehouses, godowns, and silos was called in to manage—to stabilize—the value of grain in its commodity form. This talk examines the some of the architectural and infrastructural objects that embodied the different epistemic anxieties of engineers and economists. If civil engineers equated constructional expertise and efficiency with thin shell concrete structures to achieve their goals of food storage, then economists asserted that silos enabled grain to flow through the country. Reversing these positivist desires, this talk argues that, in the context of post war developmental theory and cold war geopolitical anxieties, indeed the economy flowed through grain.