“Self-storage facilities are a ubiquitous yet ignored component of the urban and suburban landscape. In the periphery, 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 Margaret Crawford calls ‘background buildings’. They represent everyday urbanism: the extraordinary hidden within ordinariness.”
So begins Miti Aiello’s commentary in “Junk Space,” an exploration of self-storage warehouses published in “Cabinet,” Issue No. 5 of MacGuffin (The Life of Things). Accompanied by a portfolio of photographs by Johannes Schwartz, Aiello’s essay explores storage architecture as a by-product of the architecture of shopping. As she observes, “If malls were the pleasure palaces that consumerism built, storage facilities are its landfills.”
Find a PDF of “Junk Space” here.
Miti Aiello is an educator, researcher, visual artist, poet and architectural practitioner. She is originally from Italy, and her research interests include loitering, the civic and the polis, public spaces, architecture and urban design as activism, the technology of urban surveillance, and medieval painted façades. She is currently working on a manuscript on Storage Cities | Cities of Clutter.
Photo above and cover photo by Miti Aiello.
