Container Housing Jumps the Shark

It's about time blogs start to insult these regurgitated ideas. How many prefab articles and container house articles do we need to see before we finally say 'let's move on to real solutions already.' Thank you Treehugger for finally saying what needed to be said, next idea thank you!

A couple excerpts from a post about shipping container housing that went up last year on www.buildinggreen.com/live (URL below):

"Whether modified-shipping-container modules are a faster way to create the bones of a building will depend on design and scope. The style of small, simple houses shown in the clips can be conventionally framed onsite with surprising speed by experienced professionals. If the offsite work of modifying the containers - which has the upside of avoiding weather delays if the refabrication happens indoors or under cover ­ is included, it's likely a wash, in both calendar and labor hours. The time and money are invested offsite rather than onsite."

and

"As usual, the green part is the most slippery. David Cross of SG Blocks, on Art Fennell Reports, said, 'It takes approximately 800 kilowatt-hours of energy to recycle the 8,000 pounds of steel that's in a container. It only takes 400 kilowatt-hours to "value-cycle" that container into a building block... that's a 95% less carbon footprint.' (NBC used the figure 33,000 pounds in their reporting, but that must have been referring to much larger containers.) Two things: 1. Isn't 400 kilowatt-hours 50% of 800 kilowatt-hours? - how does that add up to a 95% reduction in carbon? There's not enough information in that statement - or at their website - to make a critical assessment of the quality of those numbers; and 2. Since these containers are being stockpiled, and not melted down, talking about how much energy it takes to recycle them is a red herring. It would be more useful to compare apples to apples: wall systems to wall systems.

"The biggest environmental concern that came to my mind was inspired by the hollow, reverberating thud that happened when people in the video clips rapped on the sides of the finished houses. It sounded like... an empty shipping container. The corrugated walls are skinned on the outside with sheet steel, and on the inside with gypsum board ­ and are otherwise hollow. No insulation is added to the wall cavity. Nor would it help much to do so, with so many thermal bridges linking the two surfaces..."

Click here for For the whole post

What I want to know is, when are we going to start constructing buildings using Starbuck's cups?

hear hear, well said.
perhaps we could give them staircase of the week to make up for the pasting?

This "house" also has large pink dots on the exterior. This should be your first clue that the people responsible are somewhat strange and out of touch.

There is much to be said for the reuse of highly valuable materials, such as the metal carcasses of discarded shipping containers-- and the industries arising from those specific reuses, considering the current economic situation affecting the world economy. When I first learned of architects utilizing this phenomenal resource, I was then living as a visual artist in New York City. This afforded me the opportunity of seeing-- first hand-- the expertise with which these once rusting hulks had been transformed.

Always naturally oriented, the 7 years in New York sharpened the vision of a closer relationship with the world in which we live. Space, while invaluable, can be easily designed from the smallest livable dimensions, to form a comfortable environment. Should larger spaces be required by a resident/client, skilled builders can easily conjoin containers and remove their interior walls to specs. However, at present, the majority of American families live in structures so supremely wasteful that they could never be considered "sustainable", or "eco-friendly" without shedding a significant bit of their bulk.

This refusal of designers to work within the confines of the material provided demonstrates not only a lack of creative faculties, but a total disregard for the underlying doctrine of designing for the present day. While aesthetically interesting, the designs pushing for more space leave much to be desired ideologically. Today is the day that individuals much change for the benefit of their continued survival, not the day for negotiation that results in half-approaches to reducing the human footprint on the world environments. As one who has seen the miles of shipping containers clogging the old harbors of New Jersey-- impeding the progress of the original inhabitants of those marshlands, and creating an open air "junkyard"-- the solution of reusing them in sustainable housing practices is most assuredly a real one.

i agree with the author. the idea to fabricate NEW boxes to mimic the size if shipping containers is strange and unwarranted. this would be a really cool project, if only they RE-USED old shipping containters.

I built one back in 2002. I brought home our first child to actually live in it. I am shocked at the lack of progress in desgn and construction. Where is the innovation! Just a bunch of copy cats. I am not even an architect.

Specially made containers to look like shipping containers? Huh? How UN Green can you get?

I stacked three 45' Aluminum KLines side by side on a second level and cut between the walls to had a 25' open space. Teak floors. High ceiling 9'10 ". This solved the narrow space issue.

I learned so much from doing it. There should be a collection of do's and don'ts so that people can build on our mistakes and successes.

While I agree with a lot of what the author says in his post, shipping container houses definitely have a niche in my opinion, although I might be biased because my company designs them.

In particular, they are excellent for narrow lots in cities. You can get around the small width of the containers by stacking them side by side and in a narrow long lot (which are common in older city neighborhoods), I can get more open interior space in a shipping container house more easily than conventional construction.

There is a house I structurally designed in Atlanta that is on a narrow long lot, and is built out of wood - http://www.runkleconsulting.com/AtlantaResidence/AtlantaResidence.htm Laterally bracing this thing was a nightmare. I have loads of steel straps, LVL beams, and all sorts of stuff to keep it from swaying in the wind - the interior is completely open and working the design for wind load was horrible because of the hassles with tensile connections to wood.

Down the street from this house, we did a shipping container house http://www.runkleconsulting.com/Container%20House/Shipping%20Container%20House.htm and if you look at it, you will see it takes up just about the entire lot (very narrow). The entire inside is open, there are some columns, but actually with additional steel beams, those can be easily eliminated. The lateral bracing is absurdly simple, and does not require any difficult methods like we had to put in the other house.

Now, on a larger lot, I think the main attraction of a shipping container house is it's architectural look. It also may be cheaper than other forms of construction, including prefab. Whether those items are worth it compared to conventional construction if you aren't constrained by your lot width is debatable. It really depends on the application.

So, while the author of this post is right in my opinion in his points that he makes, I don't feel that this type of construction can be completely written off.

George

more pictures with container house
www.pro-container.com