container-life

Fulton + Salomon, the Australian architects behind the Small is Smart container house we featured back in May last year have some great new designs on their website for larger scale shipping container ISBU based homes.

This one is particularly nice. It is designed using five 40 ft containers and two 20 ft containers and features the "FISH", a first floor study / library / guest room that cantilevers out 7 meters over the courtyard. Dare House will be located in a rural part of Tasmania in Australia.

You can see more pictures of this project and others on the Fulton + Salomon website.

 Tech-Nica, are a container construction company in Nicaragua.  They have posted a You Tube video of how to move a 45 ft high cube shipping container when you don't really have the right equipment.  They also have some nice pictures and a video walkthrough of their container design on their website.

One of the exhibits at the Casa FOA interior design exhibition in Buenos Aires in Argentina was based on a shipping container.  The design blends reused wood and leather along with solar panels and LED lights to make living space that is both green and stylish. More pictures and information in Spanish here and in English here.

I'm not sure if there are any plans to take this design beyond an exhibit.  Perhaps someone who speaks Spanish could fill in some details in the comments.

When Dunraven School in London, England, decided to build a new gymnasium for the students they turned to SCABEL architects and Urban Space Management, builders of Container City in London Docklands.  Together they created a gym using recycled shipping containers at a cost of only 1.5 million pounds, little more than half the cost of a traditional gym.  

The building features three sides made from shipping containers which were put in place in only three days, and a fourth side constructed from translucent polycarbonate.  The roof is built using a series of trusses.  Containers are not just used as walls in the design, but also as changing rooms and viewing balconies.  You can read more here and here.

Shipping container construction pioneers LOT-EK and YoungWoo & Associates have been chosen to design and develop the new Pier 57, part of New York's new Hudson River redevelopment programme. The 400,000 square foot design for the former passenger shipping terminal will incorporate a world class cultural centre, a small business incubator centre, a public rooftop park and film festival venue.  

Shipping containers are used extensively in the design with many of them having the walls and roof removed to create double wide and double high spaces.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic in Dublin, Ireland, a design by LiD Architects has been chosen for the new Dublin Parlour - a new civic space in the Dublin Docklands development.  LiD will use 125 shipping containers to create a venue which will be used for music, theatre, markets and other public events. More information on the two projects can be found here and here.

Infiniski, a green architecture and design company based in Spain and Chile have constructed a number of beautiful houses from recycled shipping containers, pallets old train rails and various other bits of whatever they could find. They also have plans for a large office complex in Chile built around shipping containers. See their website for all of their projects.

Gregory La Vardera of Lami Design has launched a new Shipping Container based range of house plans under the name ibu_revolution.  

The houses are all based around 12 standard modules which can be mixed and matched to the owners requirements. All the plans are based on using 3 containers placed in a U shape with a roof structure covering the space between to make a main living area.  You can find more information on the Lami Design blog along with an introductory video and Gregory also explains where the term "ISBU" comes from.  Looking forward to see some of these designs enter the real World soon.

When Avani Zaidi was planning a home for her new family in Uplands, California, she decided that she wanted to build something eco friendly using recycled shipping containers.  She asked the Claremont Environmental Design Group for help and they came up with a design based around four 40 ft high cube shipping containers and one 20 ft standard size shipping container.  

The house should be finished by the end of November this year.  Avani is blogging the construction process and has lots of pictures, videos, plans and links to vendors on her site.  It's a real gold mine of information for anyone planning their own container house.

IC Green in California are producing a range of great shipping container homes.  The homes retain the look of the shipping container both outside and inside giving them an extremely modern feel but they also include environmentally aware features such as green roofs, solar water heating and electricity and low flush toilets.

They have already built a couple of units with more on the way.  Their designs range from 320 sq ft studio apartments to 2,400 sq ft family homes.  There is more information on their website.

Da Stark Interiors have begun construction of their new shipping container office and showroom in Seattle.  The project is the first to use shipping containers in Seattle and the largest ISBU construction to date on the West coast.  Da Stark, which was founded by one of America's  top interior designers, Dixie Stark, plans to open the new facility in the Autumn.  The finished buildings should look as impressive inside as they do from the outside.

The two buildings will not only be cheaper than regular construction but greener too.  From their press release:

This unique building is being referred to as "The Greenest Building in Seattle" for its use of both reclaimed material and 'green-factor' amenities. Much of the previous structures on the site were re-used by second-use building suppliers for other, low cost green-builds. The new building will incorporate low-V paint, carpet from high-content recycled material, high-efficiency windows, a planted green roof, a 'rain garden' for catching run-off and other new finish-out building materials.

The twelve containers were were put in place on 18th June.  We'll be keeping an eye on this one to let you know how it turns out.