Archive Fever
Jacques Derrida
Translated by Eric Prenowitz
University of Chicago Press, 1996
128 pages
ISBN-13: 978-0226143675
We’ve perused the bookstacks of an infinite library to bring you uncube’s recommended reading on storage. On the shelf are shipping containers, prisons, and water towers – time to think inside the box.
Derrida’s Archive Fever investigates the language and processes of the archive and was prompted by a lecture he gave at the Freud Museum in London, itself – based in Sigmund Freud’s last home – an accumulated archive of a life. Derrida pays particular attention to our need to leave something (physical) behind: “there is no archive without consignation in an external place which assures the possibility of memorisation, of repetition, of reproduction, or of re-impression”. p (fs)
Prisons
Editor: Kyle May
CLOG, 2014
160 pages
ISBN-13: 978-0-9838204-9-9
The Box
How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
Mark Levinson
Princeton University Press, 2008
400 pages
ISBN-13: 978-0691136400
This themed issue of CLOG has collected essays, interviews and illustrations examining the architectural history of mass incarceration. Through Ai Wei Wei’s haunting description of permanent surveillance while imprisoned in China to Michael Sorkin’s plea for architects to stop designing execution chambers, architecture’s complicity in the dehumanisation prisons engender becomes clear. Far from rehabilitative, as Jacob Reidel’s opening essay points out, “...the modern prison remains a space for storage and removal”. p (gk)
This highly entertaining book, written by economist Mark Levinson, introduces us to the history of the standard shipping container. He traces this from the first container voyage in 1956 to the worldwide phenomenon of “containerisation” primarily driven by entrepreneur Malcolm MacLean, who turned “the box” from a rather impractical idea into the standard tool of a globalised, standardised economy which every ship, train, truck and eventually port had to adapt to in order to stay competitive. p (fh)
Typologies of Industrial Buildings
Bernd and Hilla Becher
The MIT Press, 2004 (reprint)
228 pages
ISBN: 978-0262025652
The Library of Babel
from Collected Fictions
Jorge Luis Borges
Translated by Andrew Hurley
Penguin Books, 1999
576 pages
ISBN-13: 978-0140286809
Architects have been drooling over blank, functional forms since the birth of modernism, and this compendium of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s monochromatic grids of photographs of industrial buildings – including many storage structures from grain elevators to water towers – is a visual feast of dumb façades. Seemingly objective but packing a powerful emotional punch, it’s like looking at an identity parade of a lost industrial age, making the Bechers pioneers of ruin porn too. p (rgw)
The infinite library that Jorge Luis Borges’ created in his short story The Library of Babel has fascinated scholars and paper architects alike since its publication in 1941. He describes a structure for storing all possible combinations of a twenty-five-letter alphabet and thus all possible language and knowledge. Like the shadowy wanderers in the library’s endless spaces, the reader too gets lost in its hexagonal chambers in search of texts revealing “the fundamental mysteries of mankind”. p (gk)
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