More on Shipping Container Housing

Container architecture is all the rage these days-They are cheap, strong and courtesy of the American trade deficit, piling up like mad. They are also narrow inside, usually uninsulated and the floors are often treated with toxic insecticides. TreeHugger has covered the subject here , and Adam Kalkin's Push-button house here. There was a good overview published in SF Gate this week: "shipping containers will never -- or at least should never-- be the ultimate building form. Steel is not a renewable resource, and moving it around is far from environmentally advisable. Ideally, our society won't overproduce these steel boxes forever. And even if it does, that overproduction won't be enough to satisfy our housing needs. But shipping-container architecture does signal a new creativity among architects and builders that may be more powerful than any magic-bullet building technique. After a hundred years of environmentally disastrous construction methods and escalating real estate prices, the shipping container is more than a harebrained scheme of an eco-shelter movement -- it's a whisper of the weird world of housing to come." ::SFGate via ::sploid. For more information visit ::FabPrefab's Container Bay.