From The Top Of A Grain Elevator

Short-listed for the 1999 CLA Book of the Year for Children Award Award-winning poet and playwright Barbara Nickel returns to her Prairie roots in a beautiful collection of seasonal poems that chart, with a bird's-eye view of the western landscape, nature's glorious playground. Nickel's experimental verses are perfectly complimented by Kathy Thiessen's black-and-white etchings, making this ideal for any young Canadian -- Prairie-dweller, would-be poet, or otherwise.

Rising above the landscape, the grain elevator heralds a time when wheat was king across the West. At their zenith, 5,758 of these prairie giants defined the economy and skyline of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. While many still stand, every year their numbers dwindle. Sometimes these towering signposts are all that is left of a town or hamlet once built around them. In this stunning photo collection, award-winning photographer Chris Attrell captures the haunting presence of those that remain to stand guard over an ever-changing agrarian lifestyle.

Shortlisted for the CLA Book of the Year for Children, award-winning poet and playwright Barbara Nickel returns to her Prairie roots in a beautiful collection of seasonal poems that chart, with a bird's-eye view of the western landscape, nature's glorious playground. Following the slough cycle and the gradual metamorphosis of the land itself, Nickel animates both nature and the children who love to revel in its altered terrains. Nickel's experimental verses are perfectly complemented by Kathy Thiessen's black-and-white etchings, making this ideal for any young Canadian--Prairie-dweller, would-be poet, or otherwise.

In this astonishing collection of photographs and drawings, Lisa Mahar-Keplinger documents on of the most American of building types: the grain elevator, revealing them as symbols of the American collective unconscious. Winner of an AIA Book Award, Grain Elevators is a companion volume to Wood Burners.

The first full-length history of the American grain elevator, from 1843 to 1943. Eight black and white illustrations, appendix, index, bibliography.

Prairie Sentinel preserves the history of the grain elevator in Canada. It covers the period from the first elevator in 1879 to the larger, more efficient terminals of today. The detailed text and archival photographs provide a lasting tribute to these cultural landmarks. In one respect the grain elevator is simply a storage container with the capacity to weigh, clean, and load grain. But as anyone who lives on the prairies knows, the elevator has a more significant social purpose and meaning. Standing out on the horizon, visible from miles away, the grain elevator is a potent reminder of the region's history and a symbol of its economic lifeblood. Farming has changed dramatically since the early days when grain elevators were new technology. Today, the elevator is quickly being replaced by innovations in farming, grain storage, and transportation. Because the country elevator has entered popular culture- especially art and literature- the loss of these monoliths is changing more than just the face of rural western Canada.

These photographs of grain elevators in America, Germany, Belgium, and France are a major addition to the Bechers' ongoing documentation of the vanishing buildings that once defined the industrial landscape of Europe and America. Bernd and Hilla Becher's almost fifty-year collaboration constitutes the most important project in objective and conceptual photography today. With this volume, grain elevators join the list of building types documented by the Bechers in their book-length studies: water towers, blast furnaces, gas tanks, oil tanks, mineheads, frame houses, and cooling towers. Grain elevators are towering structures in the flat, vast landscape of the world's granaries. Providing a fast and efficient method of loading and unloading grain to keep pace with the industrial production methods of the nineteenth century, they made possible a tremendous increase in the trafficking and processing of grain. Scooping, pouring, and spitting, they both illustrated and inspired Le Corbusier's idea of buildings as functioning machines. Monumental, essential, and visually arresting, grain elevators belong as much to the American imagination and landscape as to the European. The photographs of grain elevators in this volume were taken in Germany, Belgium, France, and America. But the specificity of time and place is erased in these photographs; the monolithic structures evoke the agricultural prosperity of a vanished era and the vacancy that replaces it today.