Study Architecture 
ProPEL 
Author(s): Mariateresa Aiello
In the periphery, arrays of self-storage facilities are part of the light industrial landscape of warehouses and ex-urban alienation. Within the urban fabric, storage buildings represent both container and camouflage architecture, and are perfect examples of what Professor Crawford calls “background buildings.”1 Self-storage facilities are an architectural typology worthy of study, and not only for their growing impact on the city and suburban sprawl, or for the uncanny ability to mimic other design typologies and adapt to the target market. They can be examined in terms of building type and construction methods. From the economic point of view, storage facilitiesare compelling: they are a by-product of shopping/goods architecture, consumerism and planned obsolescence. They embody currently popular issues of surplus and clutter/hoarding. The issue of “material excess” becomes an (ex) urban pathology, endemic to a culture of wholesale commerce and warehouse buying experiences. The clutter culture can be mapped and becomes tangible in the form of the “country of storage facilities”, a veritable document to “stuff obesity”. The current rise of self-storage facilities is also a physical reminder of the consequence of changes in social and living conditions. How do we, as architects and urban designers, confront the typology of the self-storage facility and the new urban/exurban enclaves that these commercial containers of space have created? How can we better understand the nature of the singularly camouflaged “housing of stuff” often found in the downtowns of second-tier U.S cities? The content of these buildings, the “user”if you wish, is constituted entirely of stuff we cannotor do not wish to fit in our homes. What is it that we store, and why?
https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.Intl.2016.23
Volume Editors
Alfredo Andia, Dana Cupkova, Macarena Cortes, Umberto Bonomo & Vera Parlac
ISBN
978-1-944214-10-4
