![]() “There are incredible projects and then there are ill-advised projects,” he said. That’s no longer about a low-cost form of building,” he said.Īccording to DeMaria, the evolution of container design has been like every other movement in architecture. Some designs out there have cantilevers and containers hanging off each other – these are not even containers, they’re made to look like them but they are bespoke structures that cost a fortune to make. “I use traditional containers and understand their limitations. People look at it now and think it’s obvious, but it wasn’t at the time,” he said.īut now, Wade argues, the popularity of containers is making some designers misunderstand their nature. “In those days I had issues finding an architect that knew anything about container architecture, it was too early. Boxpark opened in London’s Shoreditch district in 2011. BoxparkĪfter using containers as a cheap alternative to bespoke stands in trade shows, Wade thought of using them for a retail store that could move to different locations, an idea inspired by the work of Adam Kalkin. ![]() “There’s a school of purists that uses containers as a low-cost build module and other guys who use it mainly as an architectural deign element, because they like the industrial look of it,” said Roger Wade, the entrepreneur who built Boxpark, a 60-container retail park in London which he describes as the world’s first pop-up mall.īoxpark Shoreditch, one of the world's first container-based pop-up malls, opened in East London in 2011. More outlandish proposals – which include one from 2015 involving a skyscraper – aren’t free from criticism. “Instead of leaving behind a dilapidated area, after the event 20 or 30 different smaller sports venues can be built elsewhere from this structure, and the original site can become a public park or space for real estate development.” “It’s the perfect legacy solution,” said designer Mark Fenwick in a phone interview. Not only would this cost half as much as a regular stadium, they claim, but once the tournament is over, the whole structure could be dismantled and shipped elsewhere. "It's very ecological, the container is almost like a modern day brick, so it's an ideal building block, it does allow an amazing amount of possibilities in commercial and residential architecture," said designer Mark Fenwick. Others go straight for the wow factor, such as the Joshua Tree Residence, a 2,100-square-foot house made from white containers bursting out from a central point, to be built in 2018 just outside California’s Joshua Tree National Park. The company sells a fully ready, no-frills, 160-foot container home on Amazon for $23,000. Some are affordable, configurable and eco-conscious, such as the prefab ones made by Wisconsin-based Mods International. “All too often creatives look to reinvent the wheel but we’re already surrounded by innovative solutions in non-architecture related industries,” DeMaria said.Ĭontainer homes are varied in style and cost. Most importantly, they’re already fabricated. “It spearheaded a whole movement in the architecture world and we’re witnessing the impact today with the multitude of projects utilizing up-cycled shipping containers.”Ĭontainers, he said, are cheap, ubiquitous and resistant to many of the threats buildings usually face, such as fire, mold, termites. ![]() “We consistently posed the question, ‘what can a home be?’ as opposed of being mired in ‘what has a home been?’” DeMaria said in an email interview. The home was designed to combine heavy gauge steel and high-quality materials, while still being affordable. The Redondo Beach House by Peter DeMaria. Seven years later, futurist guru Stuart Brand of the counterculture magazine Whole Earth Catalog added to their profile with his book “How Buildings Learn,” which he wrote in a converted container. But the first indication that someone wanted to make a “habitable building” out of one came from a 1987 patent application. Little did McLean know that the intermodal container, as it would later be called, would not only revolutionize trade by decimating the cost of shipping, but it would also find a second life through architecture.Īffordable, sturdy and obviously, easy to transport, containers found an alternative use outside of shipping ports in the 1960s as portable showcases for trade fairs. He loaded a former war tanker with 58 “trailer vans,” as The New York Times called them in 1956, and set off to change history. ![]() And about 20 years after first envisaging it, McLean was ready to show his invention to the world. It turns out, there was: a big metal box that could be detached from the truck transporting it, and put on a ship. As he watched workers slowly transport the boxes by hand onto a ship, the story goes, he thought there had to be a better way to do it. In 1937, a young trucker named Malcolm McLean was delivering a load of cotton to a harbor in Hoboken, New Jersey.
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