“holdings”

As Ursula K. Le Guin famously pointed out, we have tended to overlook the life-giving role of “the thing to put things in” in favor of the life-ending pierce of the spear. Despite the attention we give to acts of force, so much of what we do as a species, and maybe our existence itself, is made possible by a supporting cast of technologies for holding, like cups, blankets, dumpsters, 18-wheelers. Buildings are like meta-bags, containing other smaller bags holding together multiplicities of items, media, and lifeforms. Enmeshed in the containment of physical things is the psychic relation of being held. The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott used the term holding environment to elaborate the relational space between mother–infant and therapist–client, one that allows multiple contradicting truths to be held at once.

The enclosing of social life, what we now call architecture, occurred through the joining of various craft traditions–ceramics, carpentry, masonry, and weaving. Textiles wrapped over rigid frames to create, in effect, oversized vessels for humans and their baggage, physical and psychic. This conception of envelope as a secondary system laid over the primary and preexisting structural one was transmuted and entrenched through the dominant practices of modernist architecture (eg. curtains walls) and subsequent paradigms, in pastiche or branding value.

When diverted from the functionalist program of modernism or the marketing agendas of capitalist development, what other roles can the container take on, or be found to already possess?