Silo 4

Sixteen concrete cells, each 7.2 metres across and 34 metres tall, slip-formed in 1931 and full of grain dust until 2018. The client asked for daylight in a building that had been designed to exclude it.

We made one cut. A 4-metre slot runs the full height of the north wall of cells 6 to 11, opened with a wire saw over eleven weeks. The removed concrete was crushed on site and returned as the aggregate in the new floor slabs, so the building is still made of itself.

Nothing else was added to the cells. The archive racking is freestanding, the services are surface-run, and the saw marks were left unground because grinding them would have cost 74,000 euros and removed the only record of how the light got in.