Strong but slender, containers can be wedged into small plots and stacked up to 9 units high. Adam Kalkin, whose $76,000 Quik House is shown above, stacked two rows of containers and roofed the space created in the middle for his 12 Container House. New York firm LOT-EK offers CHK compact (below) and CHK loft houses which both cantilever a second story of containers over the first, maximizing space with a terrace at one end of the house and a covered porch at the other. If the 2003 Seatrain house by our new eco-hero Jennifer Siegal (on her site, click “architecture” then “projects” and it’s first in the list) were next door, we’d have to confess coveting our neighbor’s house. Siegal manages to use the containers subtly, but without hiding them (see the interior shot to the left of this paragraph).

Due to the ease of transport, some container houses are planned as emergency relief housing, like the Future Shack and Global Peace Containers.

Individual houses are only half the container story, though. Larger complexes of many shipping container units address the difficulty in providing high-density prefab housing. Like Spacebox (which reader Rob Kelley pointed out would be greener if made with containers), they can operate on a system of plug-and-play pods, with utilities in a central core rather than the living units themselves. Keetwonen is developing containers into a system aimed at university students. Mark Strauss of Fox & Fowle Architects designed a 3-story curve of containers for a site in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Gloucester Green (below) would house 351 live/work units, 145,000 square feet of commercial space, and 25,000 square feet for retail. The proposal won the 2003 “Density: Myth and Reality” competition held by the Boston Society of Architects.

Eventually, the plug-and-play structures could be internationally standardized, as shipping containers themselves already are. Then you could stick your house on a boat (contents and all), move across the world, and still be right at home. Imagine: moving without packing up! It’s a globetrotter’s idea of heaven. We’re a long way from having a standard—most of the projects we’ve talked about are still only planned or prototyped—but we can see big bucks in a company that can figure out the logistics (though, in our imaginary utopia, architects of all nations join together in universal standards without a megacorporate finger in the pie).

The list of container projects at fabprefab shows some of the ways container housing is being approached, and the Shipping-Container-Architecture Information Repository has more good information. [by KK]