CONTAINER

STORE
for Sydney de Jong

This text is adapted from a presentation given

at the Varese Group meeting in Pontida, Italy
on June 17, 2018.
CONTAINER STORE
 I . CONTAINER STORE
We’ve heard it, we’ve all heard all about all
the sticks and spears and swords, the things
to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard
things, but we have not heard about the thing
to put things in, the container for the thing
contained. That is a new story. That is news.
Ursula K. Leguin
The emptiness, the void, is what does the ves-
sel’s holding.
Martin Heidegger
My grandmother, who is a potter, always insists
that she makes ceramic vessels, not art. A bowl
is to be eaten out of, to be dirtied and washed, to
be regularly touched; a cup is not to collect dust,
not to stay on the shelf, not to remain empty.
I have become curious about bowls and cups,
vessels, and other such useful things. I began
doing a study of containers and so I spent time
in the most obvious place I could think of, The
Container Store. During this time, I saw a birds
nest in the crook of an ‘e’ in the 15-foot store
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sign. The letterform ‘e’ contained the home that
contained the bird.
If a container is serving its utilitarian function,
it tends to become invisible, and only a break, a
leak, or misuse will render it visible again. Yet,
hidden behind every man-made object, there are
a plethora of containers that went into its cre-
ation. (Try making a cake with only the cup of
your hands.)
Here in The Container Store, that which is
designed to be in the background is brought to
the foreground. Here, the humble container is
on parade.
Some containers are solely to keep things in,
and some solely to keep things out.
Sometimes there is horror at what is inside, like
a leak at a nuclear plant, and sometimes there is
wonder, like opening a Kinder Egg.
Some containers are to keep close by, like a
purse, and some to keep a distance, like a fence.
Some are designed to be unnoticeable and util-
itarian like a bookshelf, some to be decorative
and meaningful like an urn. Some have no holes
like a casket, and some many holes like a colan-
der. Some containers are designed to be thrown
away like a trash bag, and others can withstand
decades of beating like a dumpster. Sometimes
they transform what is inside like a stove, and
sometimes they preserve like a can. Some are
meant to insert into other containers like a spoon,
and some to hold other containers like a build-
ing. Some containers are solely to keep things
inside itself, and some also serve to keep things
out like a fence which might keep in a dog, and
keep out intruders.
I I . THE THING
To contain, means “to hold together, to enclose.”
It comes from the Latin, con- (with/together)
and tinēre (to hold.) A container is a tool. It is any
device that creates a partially or fully enclosed
space that can be used to store, preserve, trans-
port and sometimes transform objects or materi-
als. Content is that which is contained.
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In his essay, The Thing, Heidegger challenges
scientific materialism by meditating on the
thingness of a “thing,” which is in this case a
jug, whose purpose is generally understood as a
vessel for holding.
The way a jug holds, the way it functions as a
container, he says, is more complex than one
might think. It is an event, rather than a passive
state, consisting of “taking and keeping.” These
two actions come to fulfillment in a third action,
the “outpouring,” or giving. In other words,
what makes the vessel a vessel is its ability to
supply, rather than its ability to hold, its empti-
ness rather than its mass.
And in the poured gift the jug presences as jug.
The gift gathers what belongs to giving: the two-
fold containing, the container, the void, and the
outpouring as donation.
Heidegger was describing an idealized vessel.
How then do we relate to the more ubiquitous
everyday container? Would it be useful to per-
ceive useful things in a more sacred manner?
In another essay, Building, Dwelling, Thinking,
Heidegger writes how the logic of resourcing and
supply order our physical world. Gestell—a.k.a.
enframing—is a word which usually implies a
literal physical frame or armature, but he uses
it metaphorically as the modern anthropocen-
tric mindset that calls on the world to reveal
itself as an available resource, as a container to
be poured. The enframing mindset calls on the
world to gather together and hold artificially.
There is little that hasn’t been enframed.
I I I . CONTAIN YOURSELF
The Container Store makes something explicit
that is only reluctantly comprehended. The fact
that everything resists this enframing. And so
the hold grows ever stronger.
Each customer carries out of the store and onto
the street a bag with the message in bold pink
letters: Contain Yourself. An impossible com-
mand many strive for every minute of every day.
The primary implication—a driving force of
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American consumerism—is that our selves are
defined by our stuff.
A secondary implication is that we need to con-
tain our emotions, our fluids, our words so life
doesn’t get messy (mess is bad.) So with every
container purchased, comes a bonus of psycho-
logical restraints.
A third is that by collecting things around us and
preserving them, we can preserve our mortal
selves. And so the opposite is also assumed to
be true, that a world without containers would
be the dissolution of the Self.
There are reality TV shows warning against the
woes of the hoarder, who is “buried alive” in
their uncontained belongings.
Political theorist and philosopher, Jane Bennett
claims that for every era there is a pathologized
madness. Hoarding is the madness appropriate
to a political economy devoted to consumption.
And a book by Marie Kondō is the remedy.
The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The
Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing.
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(Purchasable at Wal Mart, Target and Amazon.
com.) She provides a calming voice to guide us
through our excesses, inviting us to thank every
object as we throw it away.
I V. A BRIEF HISTORY
Our first individual encounter with a container
might be living inside one for the first nine
months of our lives, this most mysterious and
gory of apartments, as Maggie Nelson writes in
The Argonauts. The body is, after all, our pri-
mary home and container. Inside it, there is the
rib cage, the heart chamber, the blood vessel,
the tear duct, the pit of your stomach, the ball-
sack, the eye lid, the spinal cord.
Some say that the hearth was one of the first
container technologies used by early hominids
to preserve, use, and control fire. Container like
objects show up in the archaeological record
thousands of years ago, objects to satisfy the
desire to hold something for later, like water.
This is not unique to the human species, but pro-
liferates among our kind more than any other.
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A squirrel buries nuts. A bird builds nests. Risk
abatement is a pre-homosapien survival mecha-
nism. We were forged in the crucible of avoid-
ing scarcity.
These early containers were made from objects
and materials found in nature: gourds, ostrich
eggs, shells, plant matter, clay, the human skull.
Around 4000 BC, specialized transport contain-
ers came with urbanized, agrarian, bureaucratic
societies. From then on, there were consistent
efforts to improve and standardize shape, capac-
ity, stackability, insulation, surface area, tare
weight, center of gravity, stress-and-strain profile.
Containers increasingly began to serve com-
merce, reaching their peak in the 1950s in the
form of the shipping container, the largest unit of
transport to date, and the icon of today’s global-
ized economy. And so it is that without contain-
ers, there wouldn’t be over seven billion people
living on the earth. And because we have over
seven billion people living on the earth, we’re
experiencing a crisis of containment.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.
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 V. VESSEL
Last August, my grandmother, the potter, had a
stroke. A stroke is when a vessel carrying oxy-
gen to the brain is blocked by a blood clot, caus-
ing brain cells to die.
Sydney de Jong is a lifelong devotee of the con-
tainer. She has been practicing since the age of
31, the year after she had her last of five chil-
dren. Once a week, she would attend pottery
class, and Husband would “babysit” the children.
Eventually she managed to convince Husband
to build out their basement as a studio, and a few
years later, to convert the garage into a second
studio to accommodate a different type of kiln.
It was far more than a hobby, but it was not a job
either, in that she never needed to make a living
from it. Syd was explicit that she was not an art-
ist. Perhaps she is an ama-teur, for the love of
it. Or maybe she doesn’t need to be categorized.
From start to finish the potter takes hold of the
impalpable void and brings it forth as the con-
tainer in the shape of a containing vessel. The
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jug’s void determines all the handling in the
process of making the vessel.
Now she lives in a nursing home, and her two
luxurious pottery studios sit vacant. Two voids.
She uses a walker so as not fall, cries regularly
(which she never used to,) and her words come
out in jumbled spurts due to aphasia. I have
dreams of her crying and crying, or endlessly
pouring water from her mouth.
What would a jug be that did not stand? At
least a jug manqué, hence a jug still—namely,
one that would indeed hold but that, constantly
falling over, would empty itself of what it holds.
Only a vessel, however, can empty itself.
She rarely finishes a sentence, words are strung
together piecemeal and create absurd juxtaposi-
tions. The drawers organizing her language con-
nected to speech have been emptied into one big
pile. The brain too can become a hoarder.
Last time I saw her, we were saying goodbye
and she said Yes, yes stuff it. Go, stuff it. Which
felt something like, Bye, love you.
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 V I . CONTAINER STORE DESIGN So, what do we do with this polarizing relation-
ship to design, to space, and to being? How do
As a graphic designer, I make containers of sorts. we contend with the enframing mindset? What
The need for design is, among other things, a do we do with our failing containers, knowing
response to an overwhelming amount of infor- that it would be impossible to do away with
mation. It is an attempt to create order where them? Perhaps, we can let the tension leak in
there was none, to edit, to simplify, to hold infor- to the little boxes we have put ourselves in; the
mation and ideas in order that they might be com- tension between our knowledge of the ultimate
municated. Creating work for the web, I engage inability of containers to contain, and the fact
with the “box-model,” in which each web page that we keep hoping they will.
consists of HTML elements nested inside multi-
ple layers of containers. Working outwards, the
webpage is contained in a browser tab, which
is contained by the web browser, which is con-
tained by the screen, and so on. Through the
container lens, the world quickly begins to look
like a giant nesting doll, with humans placed
somewhere deep in its depths. We must make
the best of our embedded state.

Design has at some points attempted to reject

order. In the last sixty years, design has flitted
back and forth between two poles that I would
call: Container Store Design, and Hoarder
Design. Currently we are somewhere in between.

16 17
 TYVEK SUIT,

18
CANAL,
CONDOM,
INTERNET
19

PRIVACY
 POLICY,
NATURE

20
PRESERVE,
ZOO,
NATURAL
21

HISTORY
 MUSEUM,
GRAVEYARD,

22
LIBRARY,
DOOR,
CLOCK,
23
TAMPON,
REFUGEE
 CAMP,
LEVEE,

24
TAXONOMY,
PRISON,
BRA,
25

FENCE,
 HIGHWAY,
RIB CAGE,

26
HEART
CHAMBER,
BLOOD
VESSEL,
27

BALLSACK,
EYE LID.
V I . THE STORE

28 29
30 31
32 33
34 35
36 37
V I I . SYDNEY DE JONG

38 39
40 41
V I I I . PONTIDA, ITALY

42 43
44 45
46 47
I X . BITS AND BOBS

48 49
50 51
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 REFERENCED TEXTS
Bennet, Jane. 2012: Powers of the Hoard: Art-
istry and Agency in a World of Vibrant Matter,
Lecture at the Vera List Center.
Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts. Minneapolis:
Graywolf Press, 2015.
Sofia, Zoe, “Container Technologies,” Hypatia
15 (2000): 181–201.

Bevan, Andrew. “Mediterranean Container-

ization.” Current Anthropology, Vol. 55, No. 4
(2014), pp. 387–418.

Heidegger, Martin. “The Thing.” Poetry, Lan-

guage, Thought. NY: Harper Collins, 1971.
Trans. Albert Hofstader.

Heidegger, Martin. “Building Dwelling Think-

ing.” Poetry, Language, Thought. NY: Harper
Collins, 1971. Trans. Albert Hofstader.

Kondō, Marie. The Life-Changing Magic of

Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering
and Organizing. New York: Penguin Random
House, 2014.

Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization.

New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, Inc.,
1934.

54 55
 COLOPHON

Text, photographs and design

Sasha Portis, 2018

Special thanks:
Annie Correal
Celia de Jong
Antoinette Portis
Hans-Jacob Schmidt
Varese Group 2018

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