TreeHugger Picks: Shipping Containers Do More Than Ship
by Collin Dunn, Corvallis, OR, USA on 11.20.06
The holiday season really kicks in to high gear this week, and with the holidays comes lots of food, lots of drink and lots of stuff, and that stuff has to come from somewhere. Too often, it comes from ship, train and truck in ubiquitous shipping containers, so we'd like to take the chance to remind everyone that shipping containers are good for more than just running stuff on the H2O Highway.
1) From Adam Kalkin's Push Button House to the All-Terrain Cabin, shipping container prefab is all the rage.
2) Even so, they should never be the ultimate building form, though it does signal a new creativity among architects and builders that may be more powerful than any magic-bullet building technique.
3) Freitag's flagship store in Zurich employs 9 containers rising from a 4 x 2 base.
4) Section 8 is a bar made from a shipping container in Melbourne, Australia, where the novelty seems to be proving a business success.
5) Organitech has developed an automated, high-density vertical farming module for the standard shipping container.
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here is another crate project that has alot of green applications and will be the home of the EcoNexus.org (a green Google)
http://www.urbangreenpartnership.org/Web_Pages/site2/USRC.htm
Don't forget the Blackbox project by Sun (Microsystems). While I don't know if they have plans to re-use old shipping containers, it definitely seems like a promising use thereof.
http://sun.com/blackbox
I think the idea of using shipping containers in an economical way is great. But I think the larger question is how exactly will these flexible units be worked into the existing urban fabric of a city. Not just physically, but also how will it coexist with existing social and cultural systems/networks