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Shipping Container Architecture




Shipping container architecture is a less common form of Architecture that involves the use of Steel Shipping Containers as the basis for Housing and other functional buildings for people, either as temporary housing or permanent, and either as a main building or as a Cabin or Workshop .


ADVANTAGES

Shipping containers are in many ways an ideal building material. They are strong and resistant to the elements while also being durable and stackable, simplifying Construction . Structures made from them can be disassembled, moved, and then reassembled with ease. They are also quite common and relatively cheap in North America in general and the USA in particular. The relative cheapness is a result of the imbalance in manufactured goods in North American trade. The USA imports much more manufactured goods than it exports and those goods come and go in containers. As a result that country, and to a lesser extent its neighbors in North America, has more empty containers than it can fill and these empties are often made available for uses such as Architecture.


EXAMPLES

Many structures based on shipping containers have already been constructed, and their uses, sizes, locations and appearances vary widely.

When Stewart Brand the notorious Futurist needed a place to assemble all the material he needed to write ''How Buildings Learn'', he converted a shipping container into office space, and wrote up the conversion process in the same book.

Several Architect s, such as Adam Kalkin have built original homes, using discarded shipping containers for their parts or using them in their original form, or doing a mix of both,

They have also been used as


REFERENCES

  • Brand, Stewart. How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built. Penguin Books, 1995.

  • Broeze, Frrank. The Globalisation of the Oceans: Containerisation from the 1950s to the Present. International Maritime Economic History Association, 2002.

  • Helsel, Sand. Future Shack: Sean Godsell's prototype emergency housing redeploys the ubiquitous shipping container. Architecture Australia. September-October 2001.



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