This chapter aims to explore the representation of capital — specifically agricultural capital — via architecture during the 1937 Paris International Exposition, by focusing on the Canadian pavilion at the foot of the Eiffel Tower and one building of the FrenchCentre rural (Rural Centre) at the western edge of Paris at Porte Maillot.¹ Capital has historically encompassed a wide range of items, especially in agriculture, extending from finance — both fixed capital and investment — to a more grounded and open-ended signification that has included production processes, climate and the actual assets on a farm: livestock, plantations, land, buildings, machinery and equipment. Although both structures drew on the common building type of a grain elevator, I argue that they did so in distinctly different ways and thereby represented different moments of capital speculation and displacement; namely the two different stages of capitalist flow, production and consumption, as Michel de Certeau analysed them inThe Practice of Everyday Life (1988). The Canadian grain elevator was artistic and aesthetic in nature, whereas the French structure was an accurate replica of a contemporary type. Considered together, the Canadian pavilion and French grain elevator are two different representations of agricultural capital in the late 1930s; the latter, a modernist and functionalist image of a technocratic nature, the former, a nationally connotated shape of a deeply emotional value.

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Editors and Affiliations

1. University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

   Robert J. Balfour (Honorary Professor in Languages, Registrar) (Honorary Professor in Languages, Registrar)

2. St Augustine College, Catholic University of South Africa, South Africa

   Robert J. Balfour (Honorary Professor in Languages, Registrar) (Honorary Professor in Languages, Registrar)

© 2010 Guillaume Evrard

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