Page 200 - Beyond Decommissioning

Experience and lessons learned 181

Several more conversions of industrial silos are illustrated in Inhabitat (2014).
I have arbitrarily selected two quite innovative examples. The two dilapidating silos
of the former Guangdong Float Glass Factory in Shenzhen, China were converted into
a venue for the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture in 2013. The
27-m-high complex was transformed into an exhibition space with spiraling ramps
and glass floors, and was used as a venue for the event. Interestingly the company
in charge of the renovation project has its own studio an old beer factory in Guangzhou
built in the 1960s.
3
Silo 468 at Helsinki, Finland was originally built in the 1960s to store 16,000 m of
oil. The company responsible for the redevelopment of Silo 468 had hundreds of holes
punctured into the steel facade and then filled them with LED lights. So by night the
building looks like a modern lighthouse. In honor of the city’s selection as the 2012
World Design Capital, the project is a permanent wind-controlled light art installation
that creates a new public space on the water. The building is open to the public right
before nightfall and shortly afterwards. Its lights remain on until 2:05 in the morning,
creating an enthralling effect as the winds display ever-changing light patterns.
More silo redevelopment projects are quoted by Momtastic (2011). Silo Restaurant
in Lewiston, NY is a converted coal silo on the edge of the Niagara River. The massive
concrete structure was located there—with a beautiful view, which was once
ignored—because the coal stored was to power the Great Gorge Railway. The silo
was rescued in 1997 and transformed into a restaurant where guests can sit on the
round deck and contemplate the water. Two sewage treatment silos in the Zeeburg
district of Amsterdam, the Netherlands were subjected to a contest in 2009 to give
the structures a new, more positive identity. The architects turned the silos into a rec-
reational complex for sports and culture.
The huge Grain Silo Complex, situated at Cape Town’s Victoria & Alfred (V&A)
Waterfront, was once the tallest building in South Africa; it had been disused since
1990. It has now been converted into the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa.
The museum was officially opened on 22 September 2017. The nine-story structure is
2
housed in 9500 m of customized space. The galleries and the atrium at the center of
the museum have been shaped out of the silo’s dense cellular structure of 42 tubes that
2
fill the building. The redevelopment has 6000 m of exhibition space in 80 galleries, a
rooftop sculpture garden, storage and conservation areas, a bookshop, a restaurant,
and reading rooms. The museum ambience could hardly be more spectacular: placed
on the rim of a natural, historic harbor, with the Table Mountain as background, and
panoramic vistas of the ocean, V&A Waterfront entices up to 100,000 people a day
(Arch Daily, 2017).
The countryside architecture, as it can be widely seen in central Italy, generally
includes vertical annexes such as dovecotes silos (i), grain stores (ii), or tobacco
drying kilns (iii). Nowadays, those towers appear in neglect due to agricultural
decline: however, many of these are designated as Environmental and Historical
Heritage sites. A form of adaptive reuse was applied to a decaying silo at
Sant’Apollinare (Marsciano, Perugia) by turning it into a mini-biogas plant. The
selected structure changed from agricultural use to energy production: it can generate
renewable electric energy from agricultural and forestry residues. The project proved