How Buildings Can Exist in a “Continual State of Becoming”

Granaries are a staple of the American landscape. Anyone who has driven across the heartland, tracing the path of westward expansion, has seen these tall, dignified structures that have historically served as an anchor for an agrarian town’s development, simultaneously celebrating, securing, and storing its crops.

Unlike modern iterations, often made from steel, older granaries were constructed of old-growth wood; many have fallen victim to weather and time, becoming decrepit and eventually being demolished. In Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, one such aging granary was filled with pigeon feces and rotting grain. Located on the waterfront, built in 1901, and decommissioned in the 1960s, its planned demolition would have yielded an eventual development opportunity—until local preservationists stepped in to save it.

Under the design leadership of Grace La and James Dallman of the firm La Dallman, the Door County Granary, after the first two of three renovation phases, has been transformed into a public pavilion that will host events and exhibitions. Not only was the building itself saved, it is now clad in corrugated sheet metal that was salvaged from another granary that suffered a very different fate. Slated to be completed in 2027, the final structure will feature interior gathering spaces carved from the original storage bin cell walls and a winding stair and ramp system that vertically meanders from the ground floor to the top floor head house, where visitors will be treated to panoramic lake views.

The project is currently on view at the 6th edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial (through February 28), where a detailed model of the building sits among a curated seating area reminiscent of the granary’s new infrastructure. It serves not just as a victory lap for preservation, but a provocation for people within and outside of architectural practice to reconsider what is worth saving.

Perhaps most of all, the granary offers alternative definitions for the words reuse and repair, expanding their meaning from disjointed incremental fixes to an ongoing, intentional way of maintaining a structure’s value over time—or as its designers describe it, a “continual state of becoming.”

I recently spoke with La and Dallman about how language shapes the way we design and use buildings, and how to evolve existing ones so they have real, human impacts on their end users.

The biennial frames participants’ projects like yours through the lens of its theme, “architecture in times of radical change.” How does your granary project shift the term reuse from being a necessity to something that feels radical?

GRACE LA: Our project is radical in a couple of ways. First, we need to radically shift what we deem beautiful. The granary was considered an ugly duckling in every respect. But “ugly” buildings can force historic preservation to expand its ethos [when we imagine how they can best be used in the future]. We’re in a moment where you cannot preserve something absolutely as is.

How we define [beauty] is political, too. Most architects won’t take on a project like this: It doesn’t pay well, and it’s risky because its many phases of funding might not occur. You have to build political will to make them happen. If we want to see investments like this become reality, we have to take a leap of faith and pursue them even though there’s no assurance of the outcome.

You describe the granary project as an “alternative case study to prevailing preservation paradigms, where conventional financing models bypass unsavory buildings.”

JAMES DALLMAN: The granary site is well positioned in a central location, right along the water. So there were developer interests to replace it with something larger, like a hotel; people wanted development because they thought it would be better to have a tax base. Aside from that, there was a great deal of negative commentary on the structure itself.

This is not uncommon—many people will see a structure that’s dilapidated as a detriment to the community, sending the wrong message, not expressing strength or civic mindedness. When you look at your infrastructure decaying, it’s an indictment of the whole community.

GL: All the politicians said, “Tear this thing down!” Everybody wanted to get rid of it. But then a historic preservation group said, “Wait a minute, maybe we shouldn’t destroy it.” So literally, it got squirreled away: They moved the building and hid it while they figured out how to manage the politics and economics.

JD: When they started talking about rehabilitating it into a museum, a lot of community members were dead set against it. Even when they raised money—they did eventually get a state grant for part of the project—it still got a lot of pushback from certain community members who didn’t like the visuals of it: This is draining our resources. We could have a development here that could raise tax dollars, and this will not generate tax dollars.

GL: As a discipline architecture has often been the instrument of capital. At what point do we need to radically shift that? Perhaps that’s even bigger than what we’re trying to do with this little project, because it’s not making money for anybody, and is so civic to its core.

JD: The people involved on the ground have been really resourceful and hard working at making connections with the local farming community, with historical and arts communities. Eventually, the politicians came around and saw it as part of what could be seen as a cultural district.

The funding in this case ultimately was raised by the Sturgeon Bay Historical Society Foundation, the local preservation group that wanted to give the granary a new life. How did you figure out what that future looked like?

GL: Once they got some financial support, they moved the building back to its site, but it needed its columns reattached. So when they brought us on board, in 2019, we were really trying to figure out how to give it a new life.

Early on in our practice, one of our first projects was for Milwaukee’s Marsupial Bridge, a new pedestrian bridge that’s slung under a 1925 viaduct. From that project, we learned to perceive things differently; it made us a lot more sensitive about how you deal with existing things and how you can make a complete transformation without it being historic mimicry.

For the granary, we realized that by not rehabilitating the structure, but carving through it, we could create public spaces for gathering, exhibitions, and events. The project itself is a museum, in a sense, because it’s preserving this old building. People have no idea that, behind its new façade, this incredible structure exists.

How does the granary embody an alternative approach to how we typically think about reuse and repair? Obviously you’re not preserving it for its original function. Phase three calls for a subtraction on the interior, carving out visitor spaces in the storage bins.

JD: It doesn’t follow the typical trajectory of lofts or industrial buildings, the types of spaces that are easily modified for housing or offices. We’ve always had a fascination for projects that aren’t new builds, but are about what you can do with existing infrastructure or abandoned conditions.

You have to get excited about being involved, because usually there isn’t a conventional client. So you have to think a lot about how you align certain needs in the community with opportunity in the structure and the space.

GL: Right. The granary had the potential to do something else. These buildings were often in key locations, and thus well positioned to become community spaces.

So one of the questions architects could ask, in conversations around reusing and repairing buildings, could be, “How can we mine existing conditions [to get a result that genuinely serves the people living there]?”

The granary’s salvaged sheet metal cladding is an example of how the project speaks to how reuse is also about revaluing—you’re restoring value to a material seen as trash. But when James speaks about decay as an indictment I’m wondering: Is there something else being revalued through the way you think about reuse?

GL: We are in a moment where there’s a flattening effect of globalization, in which construction and locale start to become very [monotonous]. Everything looks the same. James and I were in Korea, Singapore, and Japan a few months ago. Quite frankly, their buildings look like New York buildings.

There’s something in the zeitgeist right now that’s asking, “What makes a specific place specific? How do we double down on the specificity of a place that has its own unique history and character, and bring that to the fore?”

JD: And also: “What happens when local culture gets obliterated?”

Place and local history are invaluable.

JD: Exactly.

You know, these granaries were also cooperatives. They were built to both store and distribute their contents via railway. In some ways, the Door County Granary is an artifact, part of the agriculture community’s relationship with everyday Wisconsin residents rediscovering their shared history.

That’s very important, actually: Because of the reimagined granary, there’s now communication occurring between members of the community who are interested in railroads. There’s conversation with people in the arts community, and also farmers and people involved in agriculture.

There’s typically not much conversation between those different types of people. So the project also repairs a community, an aspect of history that’s shared among very different people.


This interview took place over several conversations and has been edited and condensed for clarity.