Self Storage: an archaeology of contemporary inhabitation in the United Kingdom
Dissertation, MA Architectural History, The Bartlett, 2018

A version of this work was published in the academic journal Interiority (vol. 2, n. 1) in January 2019.

In a method influenced by anthropologists Victor Buchli and Gavin Lucas in their experimental 1997 study, ‘The Archaeology of Alienation’, this study engages in a contemporary archaeology of abandoned self storage contents, based on eBay listings photographed and itemised for sale. In this detached form of material interrogation—which manifests in observational, speculative writing—subjective encounters with the self storage contents are able to be articulated. Due to the fragmentary nature of this method, interpretations of these findings are taken largely at face value, in the absence of the subject to whom the contents belonged. This method has allowed for an examination of self storage contents on both a systematic and individual scales.

The material and theoretical engagements of this thesis are situated around four ‘modes of deferral’—scale, excess, emotional, and intergenerational—that have been observed in relation to the architecture of self storage and the material contents stored within. Articulating a meeting point between the economic and the emotional, it is through each of the four categories that the multiplicity of meaning wrapped up in the architecture of self storage, is understood.

Research, writing