Follow us on our social networks:One step missing!Go to your email and confirm your subscription (remember to also check spam)There was a fault.Please try again later.According to the story, in 1937 a young truck driver named Malcolm McLean had brought a load of cotton to a port in Hoboken, New Jersey.As he watched workers slowly transport boxes by hand onto a ship, he thought there had to be a better way to do it.And there was: a large metal box that could be separated from the truck that was transporting it and put on a ship.And 20 years after envisioning it, McLean was ready to show his invention to the world.He loaded up a former military ship with 58 "trailers," as the New York Times called the containers in 1956, and set out to change history.Little did McLean know that the intermodal container, as he would later be called, would not only revolutionize commerce by lowering the cost of transportation, but would also find a second life thanks to architecture.Inexpensive, sturdy and obviously easy to transport, the container found an alternative use outside of ports in the 1960s as a portable trade show booth.But the first indication that someone wanted to turn it into a "habitable building" came from a 1987 patent application. Seven years later, futurist guru Stuart Brand of counterculture magazine Whole Earth Catalog added his book How Buildings Learn to his profile, that he wrote in a reconditioned container.Read: Maritime trade seen by artists who live on shipsBut the father of modern shipping container architecture, or "cargotecture," is American architect Adam Kalkin, whose work in the field ranges from luxury homes in the United States to orphanages in South Africa."Containers are primarily used in architecture as low-cost pieces in an iterative process," Kalkin said in an email."That's fine, necessary and important. But the results are predictably pedestrian. We do projects that we enjoy."Read: The resurgence of prefabricated housingThis idea of ​​fun is evident in his Push Button House, a fully furnished room inside a container that opens using hydraulics, presented at the 2007 Venice Biennale.Kalkin's 2003 project, 12 Container House, is still often cited as one of the most elegant and functional examples of container architecture.Since then, he says, things have changed."It's become fashionable, so now you don't have to overcome so much disbelief when working with people," he said."Each project is another opportunity to define the future of container architecture. Right now we're marrying tough environmentalism with super nerdy technology."The “on the fly” nature of container architecture has made heroes of its pioneers.Among them is Peter DeMaria and his 2006 Redondo Beach House, the first two-story, National Building Code-compliant shipping container structure in earthquake-prone Southern California.Read: They create a container house in the California desertThe home was designed to combine heavy-gauge steel and high-quality materials while remaining affordable."We constantly ask the question, 'How can a house be?'instead of being caught up in 'what have the houses been like so far?'" DeMaria explained in an email interview."It was the spearhead of a whole movement in the world of architecture and today we are witnessing the impact with the multitude of projects that use recycled containers."Containers, he noted, are cheap, common and resistant to many of the threats buildings often face, such as fire, mold and termites.And most importantly, they are already manufactured.Read: Billionaires do not leave luxury even under the apocalypse"Too often, creatives look to reinvent the wheel, but we are already surrounded by innovative solutions in non-architectural industries," said DeMaria.Shipping container homes vary in style and cost.Some are affordable, configurable, and eco-friendly, like the prefabs developed by Wisconsin-based Mods International.The company is selling a fully equipped, no-frills shipping container home on Amazon for $23,000.Others prefer to exploit the wow factor, like the Joshua Tree Residence, a 2,000-square-foot home made of white shipping containers emerging from a central point, due to be built in 2018 just outside Joshua Tree National Park in California.James Whitaker, the London architect responsible for its design, thinks shipping containers offer a fun challenge."They give you a very standard module to work with, and you have to make it interesting. They're essentially the width of a bed, so it's a challenge to see what interesting spaces you can create with such a limitation," he said in a telephone interview.Containers remain a popular choice for emergency or temporary housing and student accommodation (a notable recent example is Bjarke Ingels' Urban Rigger modular dorms in Copenhagen), they also serve as shops, schools, greenhouses and even swimming pools.Read: Tube-houses, the solution to the housing problem?But how about a full stadium?Madrid-based architecture firm Fenwick Iribarren Architects plans to build one of the 2022 World Cup venues in Qatar from around 1,000 shipping containers.Not only would it cost half as much as a conventional stadium, they say, but once the tournament is over, the entire structure could be dismantled and moved elsewhere."It's the perfect solution," designer Mark Fenwick said in a phone interview."Rather than bequeath a white elephant, after the event 20 or 30 smaller sports sites can be built elsewhere from this structure, and the original site can become a public park or space for real estate development." ".Read: A house that is assembled in just 10 minutesThe more extravagant proposals, including one submitted in 2015 for a skyscraper, are not without their critics."There's a school of purists who use shipping containers as a low-cost building module and others who use it primarily as an element of architectural design, because they like the industrial look," said Roger Wade, the businessman who built the Boxpark, a 60-container shopping center in London that it describes as the world's first pop-up or ephemeral shopping center.After using containers as a cheap alternative to stands at trade shows, Wade thought of using them for a mobile retail store, meaning one that could be moved to different locations, an idea inspired by the work of Adam Kalkin.Boxpark opened in the London Borough of Shoreditch in 2011. "In those days I had trouble finding an architect who knew anything about container architecture, it was barely in its infancy. People look at it now and think it's obvious, but it's not It was like that at the time," he said.But now, Wade argues, the popularity of containers is causing some designers to misunderstand their nature."I use traditional containers and understand their limitations. Some designs have overhangs and containers hanging off each other - these aren't even containers, they're made to look like them, but they're bespoke structures that cost a fortune. That's far from a low-cost form of construction," he said.According to DeMaria, the evolution of container design has been like any other movement in architecture."There are incredible projects and then there are unfortunate projects," he noted."A handful of architects have pushed the boundaries with containers and the more these projects are built, the more creative the next generation of container-based design will become."One step missing!Go to your email and confirm your subscription (remember to also check spam)An error has occurred, please try again laterFollow us on our social networks:Visit other group sites:© 2022 RIGHTS RESERVED EXPANSION, SA DE CV