The Colour of Big

THE COLOUR OF BIG

by Eddie Blake

Fully saturated, square hulks slide into view as you cruise by at 50 mph. Their anonymous g e o m e t r y i s d i ff e re n t i a t e d by t h e i r super natur al l y br ight colour. Under appreciated, and often forgotten, they are otherwise symptomatic of our deep cultural contradictions: we are wealthier than ever, more acquisitive and retentive than ever, but we can’t afford the space. The spartan world of self-storage, only exists because of the abundance of luxury. They are a bold self-

assured expression of the crisis of over accumulation. Self-storage is a lifestyle wrapped in big colour. They lend that big block colour, to the motorway-scape, in exchange for your attention.

Self-storage companies sell space, or rather rent it, at competitive rates. They do this by packaging space up into universally dimensioned blocks. To minimise costs, all complexity is ironed out, creating pieces of 1

Typical Floor Plan, Off-the-shelf 18×35m self-storage centre

pre-defined exchangeable volume. Each floor of the multistory block is a pure rectilinear plan. Rooms of 16sq ft., 25sq ft., 35sq ft. or 50sq ft. are connected by corridors the same width as the storage units. Storage centres have deep, deep plans, as unarticulated as possible. Everything is secondary to the task of creating volume as cheaply as possible, with efficient net to gross ratios; maximized rentable space and minimized circulation space. The result is no architectural hierarchy; the massing is monolithic. No expressed structure, just skin. Self-storage buildings are the furthest away a building can get from singularly crafted enclosures, they are reproducible products, deployable anywhere that has vehicular access. All of this superefficient spatial product is then wrapped in

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coloured cladding, which invariably results in the kind of massive block a child would draw.

The self-storage centre is the point where the average human being comes face to face with the world of streamlined logistics. In the modern world of standardization and uniformity, your life can meld with the international friction-free logistic forever: Shipping containers and Euro-pallets, rail gauges and 4G. There is a strange disjuncture between how we store and what we store: The precision and the chaos. The modernity expressed through storage centres is part of what Mark Fisher called our “depressive hedonia”1 — a phenomenon of how we live now. Our numbed consumption, constantly seeks the pleasure sensation, with a sense that something is missing. More stuff to fill the hole, that is what leads us to using storage.

Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative, Zero Books, Winchester, 2009

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Safestore Self-Storage, North Circular Chingford

Ironically, it is the most utilitarian of spaces that hold our wildest excesses.

communication is left to colour. And that colour is saying something like ‘look at me’, ‘it’s OK’ or even just ‘easy’.

In a sense there is a perfect parity between the exterior and interior – a one-line poem about being a one liner. Monosyllabic architecture.

When discussing contemporary city making, in her book, Extrastatecraft, Keller Easterling points out, “ironically the more rationalised these spatial products become, the better suited they are to the irrational fictions of branding, complete with costumes”2. What fi c t i o n a r e w e b u y i n g h e r e ? Th e s e architectures contain or carry no references, no recognizable elements which could be ordered or arranged. There is no modelling or plasticity to express programme, all the job of 2

Lok’n Store has gone for a punishing orange, Access is primary blue, Shurgard is primary Red, Big Yellow and Magenta Storage speak for themselves. The Manchester Big Yellow Storage is inexplicably red, but in general these businesses stick to the brand. Bolder, flatter, bigger — that’s what our attention deficit culture demands. Architecture with the qualities of a children’s toy. The colour is doing a job that a sign couldn’t. It communicates faster and over longer distances. The singular colours are also a product of planning regulations. Sifting

Easterling, Keller. Extrastatecraft, the Power of Infrastructure Space Verso, New York 2016

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Big Yellow Self-Storage, North Circular Edmonton

Interior, Anywhere

through storage centre planning applications, a trend emerges. Requests for bigger signs are refused. Transport for London and other agencies responsible for road safety object to large motorway commercial signage — so the colour is the sign.

Beacons of colour guiding you to the spot, just off the ring road. The colour is so big,

from a mile away as you creep along in the slow moving traffic, it’s still visible. And that’s the point. They are perfectly designed for their context — part of the character of the motorway, part of the metricised modern condition. Permanent beacons of overconsumption.

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Self-storage and its cousins — the big-box stores — are the urban-object equivalent of that interior spatial phenomena, Junkspace3 – the commercial imperative, the placeless-ness, the complete lack of specificity, and they also share Koolhaas’ other preoccupation, functionalism. They are a deeply practical response to frivolity. In a sense they are the apotheosis of a strain of functionalist Modernism, or rather the truest manifestation of modernisation. “The built product of modernisation is not Modern Architecture it is Junkspace”4 as Koolhaas put it.

Self Storage" were built in Lubbock, Texas in 19705. All struggling for pole position in the phone book. This exemplifies the industry’s other defining feature – it has been driven by metrification and systemization from its inception. Self-storage games the systems of late capitalism, and in so doing eventually created late capitalism’s most enduring vernacular, the ‘motorway coloured big-box’.

The sector originated in Texas in the 1960s as prefabricated tin garages, usually on the industrial periphery of the city. Previously, before the ‘self ’ part, storage was done in palletized warehouses. Tenant belongings were crated and stacked three-high in wooden boxes. The boxes were maneuvered with forklifts. This worked well for long-term, predictable storage durations but it was inconvenient and costly to the customer if they wanted access their belongings. This model still exists, but is far less popular. Selfstorage proved immediately successful. Since the mid-60s, mini storage facilities have proliferated across the United States, Canada, Australia and Europe.

The majority of facilities operating today are classified as "second generation" self-storage.

Mostly purpose-built multi-storage facilities in the steel frame, block-saturated colourpanel clad model.

They, along with the other big-box stores like B&Q or Ikea, form an extra-urban Bigness urban form that resists integration with the rest of the city. Proliferation is inevitable, the big box demands more big boxes. What arrived on the orbital at the big box furniture shop, will inevitably return to the orbital in the big box storage.

The phenomena of self-storage centres were fully saturated from their inception. One origin story is that in 1963, Russ Williams, built the first self-storage facility in Odessa, Texas with his stepson Munn. They painted it completely in bright yellow, with black doors.

They called it "A-1 U-Store-It U-Lock-It UCarry the Key". The company’s name was an attempt to get listed first in the phone book, optimizing their advertising potential. They built a second facility in Odessa and named it "A-1 U-Store-It Warehouses". "AA Storage" was built in El Paso in 1969. "A-ABC Self Storage", "A-1 U-Store-It", and "Aardvark

Koolhaas, Rem. “Junkspace” Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, Office for Metropolitan Architecture, 2001

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Ibid.

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“Self-storage History” https://www.aaaselfstoragelufkin.com/news/self-storage-history-and-background-0

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Big Yellow Self-Storage, North Circular Edmonton

Self-storage centres populate the no-man’s land where suburb blurs into suburb. For such a banal landscape feature, self-storage is a surprisingly fertile cultural indicator. They say so much without meaning to. Being located on orbitals is a product of their logistical imperative, but the orbital road also holds cultural connotations. A favourite of the psycho-geographer, the orbital motorway has represented different things over time. When first built, they were the realization of early twentieth century planners’ rationalizing ambitions. Orbitals became an expression of late 1960s techno-optimism, a kind of inversion of the post-war motorway that took you away. Post-boomer, the orbital became the site of counterculture, a serotoninsaturated circle of speed. But Generation X came down, grew up, had kids, and got

divorced. Now they drive through non-places with enigmatic names like the Hanger Lane Gyrator y System or Gravelly Hill Interchange, and deposit their accumulation.

Safestore, Access Self-Storage and Storage King and all the other imaginatively named storage centres contain our most intimate belongings, the collective unconscious of stuff, stored safely, invisible behind the block of colour. Hidden in plain sight. The stored items are sometimes innocent possessions, haunted by poignant sadness: they are mementos that we can’t live with, and yet can’t live without, and exemplify the downside of acquisition, the moment when you realize there are more bread machines, plastic lawn chairs, and treadmills than anyone could use in a lifetime. Or they signify the 6

Safestore Self-Storage, North Circular Chingford

thirtysomething moving back in with his parents, with nowhere to put his black leather couch. These window-less Museums of Personal Failure – hold the detritus of divorce, the collection of a deceased parent, the dilemmas of the down-sizer. Self-storage is a resort for those going through trauma. Most users are experiencing one of the big three; death, divorce or moving house.

resisting easy interpretation. Self-storage centres become places of self-examination, self-doubt, self-indulgence, self-abuse or selfimprovement. Cheaper than an analyst, less questioning than a rabbi, and less work than an allotment, self-storage units are where people can find and lose themselves. They have become places where people pack away their collections, run their mail order business or carry out their clandestine pursuits, or worse. Self-storage centres have sunny, primary colored, easy demeanor, which can hide the most sinister innards. The murdered bodies of secretary Kathryn Chappell and teacher Jane Longhurst were both found in storage, Chappell in Manchester in 1993 and Longhurst in Brighton in 2003. In a Buckinghamshire lock-up in 2004, police found a record haul of cocaine. A year earlier,

Of course, the most significant part of 'SelfStorage Unit' is the 'self ' bit. The units give you, the individual, storage agency; to store whatever you want, whenever you want. All the while hiding it behind a bright flat hue.

That which is stored, by being hidden, perhaps therefore reflects a truer version of you. Like our subconscious there are hidden layers in storage. By their nature they conceal, 7

Stored detritus, GBN Self-Storage, A12 Leyton

bomb making material, ammonium nitrate fertiliser was found in an Access Self-Storage in London; seven men with al-Qaeda links were convicted following a police operation that involved replacing the warehouse receptionist with an undercover officer. The terrorists who attempted the first World Trade Centre bombing also used storage units for their explosives materials.

Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, kept explosives in storage units in Kansas, renting them with fake ID.

coloured façade. The big reveal is when the contents are exposed, normally to the disappointment of participants there is just piles of personal possessions. Magazines and broken electronics tumble out of the lock-up, sentimental value but no exchange value. This kind of TV sits in the same category with Doomsday Preppers, a steroidal cousin of the home make-over shows. It’s TV on the precipice, the kind of cultural phenomena future historians will look at and think – we should have known then. Prepping (a subculture of eschatological fantasists) is itself like a heightened product of the storage impulse. Preppers often stockpile large supplies of house-hold items and food, in anticipation of a large-scale disaster event.

Whereas the prepper tries to store secretly, the self-storer is happy to do it in public.

Like any contemporary sub-culture, selfstorage has its associated pulp TV. Storage Auctions, Storage Wars and Auction Hunters make prose drama content from the content of the lock-ups. The dramatic arc of the shows is dependent on discovering what’s behind the 8

Reception Sign, GBN Self-Storage, A12 Leyton

In late capitalism, conspicuous consumption and its inversion, stealth-wealth minimalism, both rely on self-storage. Self-storage negotiates the contradictions between the excess and the stark. As such, storage centres are an icon of our moment. Perhaps we only start really noticing the traits of ubiquitous forms when they have been around for a while. Novelty can be dazzling. Now gazing at the storage centres as we cruise by, are we witnessing their swansong? Smaller, more centrally located units are becoming more popular. If we are going to respond to the ecological imperative before it’s too late, our over-consumption will have to go. Selfstorage centres will be the unintended victim of our genuine progress. But that would be throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Self-storage’s mute potential could contribute more to the city. Self-storage has given us an abiding new typology, which is inextricably linked with powerfully alluring colours. The block colour of the self-storage unit is a complete expression of our current systems: the contradictions concealed behind the bold simplification. They are commodification and over-production made tangible, and perhaps even beautiful. It is not the high-rise or the high-status cultural building that typifies our current moment, it is the building on the edge of town, the massive coloured box.

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Big Yellow Self-Storage, A12 Bow

graphic design by Valentino Danilo Matteis 10