Stock: Toward the Warehouse and Beyond

“The way you store things says less about the objects than about how you seek security in the face of time, scarcity, the unexpected, or excess.” This sentence, displayed at the “Stock, Architectures of Survival and Transmission” exhibition, prompts introspection: am I a collector who accumulates, a tinkerer who considers the use (and presumed usefulness) of every object, or a survivalist anxious about what may be lacking tomorrow? The warehouse can thus be seen as a reflection of our personalities—on an individual as well as a collective scale.

Organized by the Pavillon de l’Arsenal and on display through June 28 at La Poste Rodier, the Stock exhibition is designed to spark “awareness of the necessity of storage, explains Julie Herpin, a mediator at the Pavillon de l’Arsenal, who guides visitors through this former postal sorting center, whose conversion into housing is expected to begin in October this year. The exhibition is divided into three parts: an overview of storage buildings, their evolution through the ages, and finally interview videos offering avenues for reflection on storage.” As visitors move through the aisles, discovering 18 types of storage architecture represented by scale models—all at the same scale—making it possible to visualize their evolution, they are prompted to question how they live, how they consume, and therefore their power to activate logistics and reveal the specific nature of the relationship between stocks and flows today.

In its early days, storage served to ensure survival and was therefore devoted to foodstuffs, but also to raw materials, documents, and even objects likely to be passed on or exchanged. The warehouse stood at the heart of villages, among homes, and was a place for sharing, with architecture adapted to climatic constraints and in harmony with its environment. For a time, it retained its importance, with buildings often located near seats of power. With the advent of the railroad, storage moved away from city centers but retained its visibility and its reassuring capacity to address possible shortages. The past 20 years have nevertheless marked a turning point: storage has expanded on a considerable scale, but it no longer serves survival and transmission.

“We are witnessing the massive expansion of gigantic buildings whose sole function is storage,” explains Paul Landauer, curator of the exhibition and professor at the École nationale supérieure d’architecture Paris-Est. “These include logistics warehouses, data centers, and self-storage facilities. Relative to the number of people alive on Earth, the cumulative stock of foodstuffs, data, and objects they contain has never been so large in human history. From 100 to 200 objects stored by one person in the 1990s, we have reached nearly 3,000 objects today. We have moved away from the fundamental act of setting aside what we have carefully and patiently selected in preparation for the future.” At the same time, “in recent years, we have favored flow over stock,” observes Jonathan Sebbane, CEO of Sogaris, a patron of the exhibition alongside the City of Paris, the Métropole du Grand Paris, and La Poste Immobilier. “This raises the issue of sovereignty, as we saw during the COVID crisis in 2020. Yet the doctrine of productive sovereignty depends on our capacity to store.”

The exhibition thus examines the relatively recent abandonment and disappearance of storage from urban landscapes. “This quite notable sidelining is all the more surprising because the need for storage in all its dimensions remains a major issue,” adds Paul Landauer. “Yet the great complexity and strategic nature of supply and storage logistics in our cities is undeniably a technical, social, ecological, and architectural issue of our time. In a context threatened by geopolitical instability and the growing concern to reduce our carbon footprint, we must move away from the just-in-time principle and favor, as was the case until recently, the building up of reserves.” A plea to re-architect storage, the exhibition also encourages the stockpiling of materials already extracted so they can be transformed, rather than producing them anew every day. “But reuse requires stock-based logistics, not flow-based logistics!” comments Simon Givelet, an architect featured in one of the video presentations at the end of the visit.

To encourage as many people as possible to engage with these storage issues, the Pavillon de l’Arsenal is developing new freely accessible educational materials alongside the exhibition—a game map, a quiz, and a book written by the exhibition’s curator—allowing visitors to explore the subject independently and playfully.

“Stock, Architectures of Survival and Transmission” runs through June 28 at La Poste Rodier, 30–32 rue Louise-Émilie de la Tour d’Auvergne, in Paris’s 9th arrondissement.