La grammatica dei porti. Una morfologia speciale di paesaggi analoghi, il caso del Grain Elevator di Buffalo

If to trace back the codes of formation of port cities, a preferential path of investigation is that outlined by port iconography especially linked with the treatises of classicism, more recently it is maritime geography the discipline that has dealt with these evolutions, cataloguing the urban-port configurations with universally comprehensible interpretative diagrams. Especially between the 19th and 20th centuries, ports underwent similar phases of development, characterized by the impressive expansion of the port territory and the gradual obsolescence and decommissioning of the oldest maritime centers. More recently, global phenomena (i.e. the unification and automation of cargo, naval gigantism, intermodal traffic and the ports regionalization) have forced ports to provide themselves with the same equipment to meet operational needs such as loading and unloading ships, storage, handling and control of goods, distribution and, in some cases, processing of semi-finished products. This proliferation of recurrent forms and devices at the service of mechanization, standardization and, ultimately, of the rules of logistics is the origin of collective characteristics: a special morphology of landscapes and utilitarian architectures that recurs in ports even at very distant latitudes. Following the evolutionary trajectory of a single artifact – such as the grain elevator designed in Buffalo in the United States at the end of the 19th century – and tracing its examples in several world ports, it becomes clear that the morphological-compositional analogies of ports are connective instruments that narrate the signs that have settled down through a mechanism of reciprocal relationships. By resembling each other and producing specific landscapes – which Carola Hein defines as port cityscapes – port cities are in fact reflections of each other: precisely because of their analogous character, they generate a common grammar that can be continuously replicated, even in the contemporary context.