The Backstage of the Curated Life

In The Society of Singularities, Andreas Reckwitz describes a profound transformation of late-modern life. Increasingly, people do not simply inhabit homes, pursue leisure activities, or consume goods; they curate them. Everyday life becomes an aesthetic project in which objects, places, experiences, and identities are selected for their perceived distinctiveness. As I discussed in a recent post, this shift from the grown to the curated has consequences for architecture and the city. But what happens to everything that does not make the selection?

A recent New Yorker essay by David Owen on the extraordinary proliferation of self-storage facilities in the United States suggests an intriguing answer: it does not necessarily disappear. It is moved elsewhere.

Self-storage is usually explained pragmatically. People move, inherit furniture, divorce, downsize, or simply run out of room. Yet its enormous expansion also points to a deeper contradiction in contemporary material culture. We desire increasingly controlled, coherent, and carefully composed domestic environments while remaining reluctant to relinquish the material accumulation from which those environments have been extracted.

The minimalist interior and the storage unit may therefore be two sides of the same phenomenon. This makes self-storage architecturally interesting. These buildings are almost the inverse of the spaces celebrated by contemporary lifestyle culture. The home is individualized, photographed, designed, and displayed; the storage facility is anonymous, repetitive, windowless, and hidden. One contains the objects through which we construct an identity. The other accommodates everything that currently has no place within that construction. In sociological terms, we might call the storage unit the backstage of the curated life.

At the urban scale, however, this backstage becomes remarkably visible. Self-storage facilities, logistics centers, warehouses, and fulfillment centers increasingly occupy large areas at the edges of cities and along transportation corridors. They constitute an expanding architecture of accumulation: buildings whose purpose is not primarily dwelling, production, civic life, or even direct consumption, but the circulation and indefinite retention of things.

There is a striking paradox here. The more immaterial, individualized, and aesthetically refined contemporary life presents itself, the larger the physical infrastructure required to sustain it may become. The carefully curated apartment does not necessarily represent a society possessing fewer things. It may simply conceal its excess more effectively.

Seen this way, self-storage is not an architectural curiosity at the margins of the city. It is a spatial symptom of a broader cultural transformation. If Reckwitz helps us understand why contemporary society increasingly values the singular, David Owen’s “American religion” of self-storage reveals where some of the non-singular remainder goes.

Perhaps the architecture of our time is therefore not represented only by the spaces we choose to show. It is equally revealed by the spaces we need in order to hide what no longer fits the image.