ARCHITECTURE : Proof That Self-Storage Buildings Can Enrich the Urban Landscape

Two wrongs might not make a right, but two destructive building types put together might actually make for a better city.

The proof is to be found in the concrete-block storage buildings that fill up some of the dark strips underneath our freeways. Left to their own devices, the storage buildings become hulking masses inserting their deadening forms into neighborhoods, while overhead freeways create shadowy, dirty voids cutting through the city. Combine the two and you get, at worst, a respectable street wall and, at best, some interesting spaces.

My favorite example is Hollywood Bowl Self Storage underneath the Hollywood Freeway at Argyle Street. Through a combination of chance and design, this cheap, closed compound offers some wonderful urban experiences. First, it helps to emphasize the edge that the freeway gives to the northern edge of downtown Hollywood. The little building helps anchor the freeway to the ground as it arches overhead where it comes out of the Cahuenga Pass.

On Franklin Avenue, it gives us not just a blank wall, but a niched edge that snakes its way around the columns holding up the road above. These walls have been painted, in the best Los Angeles tradition, with slightly surreal murals of scenes of the city at night, a verdant valley, skies filled with planes and eagles, and portraits of movie stars. The artist, Dan Collins, has mixed in abstract patterns and strange fragments such as eyes, Egyptian figures and Michelangelo’s “Creation” to give you the sense of a fevered vision of Los Angeles.

The entrance to Self Storage is a grand affair. An almost Classical line of columns defines the facade on Argyle Street. The road dips down here, so the columns rise up to majestic height as they frame a gated entry. A small office and apartment control access. Windows, doors and hanging plants are a last reminder of the normal scale of the outside before you move into a strange world.

Streets reach back into this secluded space, stepping up the hill and circling around the whole site. The result is a composition not unlike that of an Italian hill town, filled with variety and seduction. These are not fancy buildings, just concrete-block shacks with metal garage doors, but the luck of the site creates a truly urban configuration. Even better, the plane of the freeway closes off the sky above you, giving you the impression that you have entered a lost world built into a deep canyon.

The sense of mystery only deepens as you move further into the domain of Hollywood Bowl Self Storage. The ground floor is filled with rows of garages that have somehow lost the homes they belong to, but the second floor does have an interior. Inside are tall corridors into which countless doors open. You can only imagine the lives stored inside these spaces. Here is the accumulation of years of living crammed into repetitive modules. Far removed from the city, these are worlds we will never know.

You can drive by these storage spaces every day and their relentlessly bright orange colors only offend you. You can drive on a freeway every day and never wonder what is hidden below you. At this one intersection, your curiosity is awakened and a different kind of space is defined. It may not be beautiful, and it certainly wasn’t intended to be anything but efficient, but there, hidden from the Southern California sunshine, is a seductive space of mystery masquerading as a storage bin.

Aaron Betsky teaches and writes about architecture and urban design.