The Georgia Tech Library is proud to present Exhibitionist Storage: Reimagining Civic Architecture through Self-Storage at the Interactive Media Zone (IMZ), located on Price Gilbert’s Grove Level, through Thursday, Feb. 12.

Created by 14 senior studio undergraduate students in the School of Architecture, Exhibitionist Storage is curated and by architect and educator Hyojin Kwon. It brings together speculative architectural projects that ask an unlikely but urgent question: What if storage — one of the most ubiquitous, yet invisible building types in the contemporary American city — were treated as a civic architecture?

Developed over the course of the Fall 2025 semester, the projects take self-storage facilities — often dismissed as banal, anonymous containers of excess — as a serious architectural and cultural subject.

ABOUT EXHIBITIONIST STORAGE

Self-storage is among the fastest-growing architectural typologies in the United States, expanding rapidly along highways, suburban corridors, and urban edges. Despite their prevalence, these facilities are typically designed to disappear from public consciousness: blank façades, inward-facing logics, and tightly controlled access. 

They quietly absorb the material residue of contemporary life — objects displaced by mobility, precarity, inheritance, and accumulation — while remaining architecturally mute. 

Exhibitionist Storage challenges that muteness. The projects on view reframe self-storage as a civic architectural typology, asking what happens when storage is made visible, legible, and public. Rather than treating storage as a purely private utility, the students imagine it as a spatial, cultural, and urban instrument — one that negotiates tensions between accumulation and access, privacy and exposure, memory and value.

Each project proposes a large-scale architectural intervention sited in Atlanta, hybridizing storage with public programs such as archives, exhibition spaces, markets, libraries, and civic platforms. In many of the proposals, the façade becomes a critical interface: not a neutral envelope, but an active mediator between the hidden logics of storage and the public realm. Through sectional cuts, porous skins, and performative envelopes, storage is exposed, curated, and staged.

The physical exhibition pairs meticulously crafted models with drawings and digital media displayed across the IMZ’s integrated screens. Visitors encounter not only formal explorations, but also arguments about time, care, and surplus embedded in architectural form. Storage is revealed as an architecture of deferral — spaces designed to hold things temporarily, often indefinitely — and as a system that reflects broader social and economic conditions.

What distinguishes the exhibition is its insistence that storage is never neutral. The projects collectively argue that storage participates in shaping civic life, even when it claims not to. By making storage exhibitionist, the work proposes architecture as a tool for rethinking how societies manage excess, visibility, and value.

Situated within the Georgia Tech Library, the exhibition benefits from its setting. As visitors move through the IMZ, the projects are encountered not as isolated objects but as part of a living public environment, inviting casual engagement alongside sustained study. The Library becomes an apt host for work that treats storage as a form of cultural memory and civic infrastructure.

Exhibitionist Storage offers a compelling glimpse into how architectural education can critically engage everyday building types and reimagine them as sites of public imagination. In doing so, the exhibition asks viewers to reconsider the spaces that quietly hold our lives — and what it might mean to bring them into view.

SPECIAL THANKS

Student participants: Amelia Barnard, Krishna Bhanderi, Delaney Bourg, Evelyn Bravo, Violet Cerbone, Doris Deng, Amy Cha, Alexis Lamar, Shain McHatton, Luca Maalouli, Mais Mehyar, Louise Richens, Yasmeen Smeirat and Carson Will.

With support from: Julie Ju-Youn Kim, School Chair, School of Architecture, College of Design