My Future / aka "My Best Friend's Latest Obsession"My best friend has become completely obsessed with the new building trend, of building houses, apartments and condominiums from shipping containers.While this immediately looks like some wacky Myers Brigg techno obsession, there actually is a lot of good reason for it.For the both of us, the big one is the price tag. Your average raw material cost, for the raw materials to construct such a house varies of course from house to house. But I hear, the average house is around 10K. (you pay a few thousand, for each huge 10x40 ft container that put together like Legos to construct whatever kind of a house you want. And of course many interesting floor plans already exist that you can get from various companies).
And of course the actual construction cost is a fraction of what a traditional house is. You save on having an army of carpenters and construction people working for weeks/months. Instead you have a couple welders, work a few days, as well as few electricians, plumbers.There are a few other benefits. The actual structure of the house is really, really strong (a few times stronger than a regular house). Which for natural disasters and other catastrophes is a plus.But the price tag, that really the ticket. We are both use to being at "The wrong end of the power curve". When we finally become Holy Chocolate multimillionaires (dream) we want to invest and/or save that money. And we don't want to wait a million years waiting to save money enough to afford a down on a house in our current ridicoulously inflated area (should we end up staying here). And of course construction time itself is a fraction of a regular house, plus weather is not a problem in building except for laying the foundation.
Of course there is a down side to the container house. Namely the reputation. City building permit givers may have the same reaction as Gina (a negative one). But it's important, to not make snap decisions, but look at "All the facts". Which is why I included the nice interior picture (see the pretty picture Gina, don't you see how this can be nice).
Anyway for those of you interested Iwould recommend these articles on the web.
"So Called 'Container Houses' "from LiveModern and "Shipping Container Prefab" from treehugger.com
I would link to them but doing so screws up my formatting.
posted by Addai | 9:25 AM
8 Comments:
here's a story about the guy who started this movement. It's very informative.
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_20040505/ai_n12787447
well that didn't work )making a link) so here's the article....
Mortgage too much? Try living in a box
In the Kentish town of Rochester, a remarkable new development of two-bedroom apartments will be unveiled next year. At first glance, they will seem entirely in keeping with the town's historic 16th- and 17th-century architecture. The flats will be quietly Modernist, their timber weather-boarding ensuring that they blend harmoniously with the conservation area in which they stand. Were you to strip the wood away, though, their secret would be revealed: the flats are to be made of old shipping containers from a container graveyard in London's Docklands.
This novel form of recycling is the work of the award-winning architect Nicholas Lacey, perhaps better known for his prestigious Crown Reach building in Vauxhall, the Rotherhithe Tunnel Bridge and Heron Quays, at the foot of Canary Wharf. But ever since he wrote his Architectural Association thesis on the subject in the late Seventies, he has been obsessed with reclaiming redundant containers - the rusting hulks you find stacked up around the ports of London, Liverpool, Manchester and Felixstowe. These are objects so devalued that even their worth as scrap steel has made crushing them uneconomic.
Indeed, he has already put his theories to the test. Four years ago he was asked by the Peabody Trust housing association to develop an inhabitable bridge at Bow Creek in London's East End. The project was abandoned, but the idea behind it, to make it out of containers, was to find life elsewhere. First there was the so-called Container City, 12 studio workshops for artists at the appropriately maritime location of Trinity Buoy Wharf, opposite the Millennium Dome. The scheme was conceptualised by the leftfield property developer Eric Reynolds, the man behind Camden Lock and Spitalfields Market and now head of Urban Space Management, and brought to life by Lacey. Next came ContainerLearn, six classrooms in a three-storey construction for Tower Hamlets College, followed by the 30-unit, five-storey and multi- coloured Container City 2, by the Thames' listed Lighthouse building.
Lacey's latest container site is a number of bold red work spaces, complete with container cafe and boardroom, created for Leaside Regeneration in east London. It took its first tenants in late April and "it's been very successful", says Leaside Regeneration's development director Phil Smith. "Tenants might at first think they're getting some kind of Portakabin, but when they see them they love them. These are funky, fun, unusual buildings. You certainly wouldn't know you were in a container." Another scheme, for Poole in Dorset, is on the cards. What might at first seem like an offbeat idea is gaining momentum - ContainerSpace, the company Lacey created as a sideline to his main practice, is slowly taking over.
"In the abstract I think the idea of building homes and offices out of containers may not be convincing," says Lacey, speaking from his Thames- side studio, the better, perhaps, to nab passing containers. "But when people see them the reaction is very positive. The only negative reactions come from nervous planners. But it's important for them to be open to innovation. And they ought to be interested, given the economic and ecological aspects. It's clear from the outside what these homes and offices are made from, though from the inside they just seem like stylish, well- lit spaces. But it still takes some pressure to get clients interested."
While standard construction techniques remain expensive, slow and not highly eco-friendly, Lacey is providing a brilliantly simple yet effective alternative. Containers have to be certified for commercial use and recertified periodically. When these 8ft 6in by 8ft 6in by 40ft containers, still in good condition but at the end of their working lives, come up for recertification, Lacey buys them at between pounds 800 and pounds 1,000 each. Not bad for around 800sqft of living space. Damaged ones he buys for even less, knowing that his plans allow for the dents to be cut out.
"I certainly know my containers now," says Lacey. "Although most containers are made in the Far East, they're not all made to the same specifications by the same manufacturer, so you have to pick those that work together. But I have spent a lot of time in some pretty unpleasant places to gain that knowledge."
His purchases are then transported to Lacey's own factory, where a team of just eight cuts and re-welds them to Lacey's plans, repainting or retouching them according to whether they are for interior or exterior use. While the containers are very rigid and strong when whole, cutting them may require the addition of columns and gussets to re-strengthen them to meet building regulations. Then the team adds basic thermal and acoustic insulation, windows, partitions, doors, electrics and plumbing and a felt roof - because rain on a metal box can be distracting. Each container is wrapped in what Lacey calls a "canvas tea cosy" and transported, more or less ready-made, to its resting place.
Lacey's small team alone can build a 20-unit structure in a matter of a couple of months, with a bigger, more intense production line able to pull off the feat in just days. It can take just 15 minutes to lift it into place on site and perhaps a day to fully fit an entire floor of a container-based building. Units can even be bolted together, rather then welded, so that the structure can be moved elsewhere at a later date if required, while opened container doors have proven the perfect structural support for a pretty balcony.
The result? Accommodation that can be built at less than half the cost of a typical brick-and-mortar building. In the case of the planned Rochester development, with an estimated rental value of just pounds 100 a week for a two-bed flat, it makes for genuine low-cost housing. And this at a time when the South-east especially is facing a housing-shortage crisis.
The only maintenance these container buildings require, like many houses, is a fresh coat of paint every four years or so. Perhaps this is why the idea has been adopted by other architects with such zest. Urban Space Management has its own ContainerCity business, which has built live/work studios overlooking Loch Lomond. The many other projects that have taken off since Trinity Buoy Wharf opened include the US designer Adam Kalkin's several container-built vacation homes for clients in New Jersey, Sydney's Royal Wolf Containers' portable beachside cafe and camping sites made from containers, and New York designers LOT-EK's development of a self- assembly "container home kit".
Fox & Fowle Architects, also in New York, has recently won a nationwide planning competition for its Gloucester Green project, proposing the use of containers to construct some 300 low-cost live/ work units. Even though the building has yet to be realised, the ecological initiative is clear: the Fox & Fowle team was inspired by a Port Authority report late last year revealing that because of the US's growing trade deficit, there was a surplus of nearly 950,000 containers in New Jersey's Newark Elizabeth port alone.
"Planners may wonder why they'd want what they perceive as being hunks of metal, and it's unfortunate that containers do have something of a negative image, whether they be associated with prisons in Afghanistan or with being found full of illegal immigrants," says John Burton, Urban Space Management's project director. "Pre-fabs also cause unease in the building industry, because there's this post-war idea that they all let in drafts or fall apart. But containers do make for fantastic spaces. I hope interest in them is not a flash in the pan, because they do offer a real opportunity to solve accommodation problems. They offer a simple solution. Certainly there's no reason why container cities can't be built around the country."
"I'd like to see these container homes built on a larger scale now," agrees Lacey. "It's great to do prototype schemes, but it's time now to put their real benefits into action with something much bigger. There is a need to find radical new ways of building. I've seen containers used before, as a site hut, or as a house once in the West Indies. But our innovation is to pile them up and open them out - to burst out of the box, if you like. Containers have a strict structural discipline, so they can't be used in all sites. But we're managing to get them into some pretty tricky spaces."
Getting the pre-fab homes to their site is perhaps the only potential hiccup. Containers may be ideally suited to transportation - indeed, there is an entire global trucking, shipping and even air- freight infrastructure devoted to doing so, which bodes well for Lacey to export his container homes, or for them to be used in Third World countries or in disaster- relief situations. But local traffic can play havoc with installation plans.
"For one project we had to arrange for the main route into London's Blackwall Tunnel to be coned off," says Lacey, "and the only time the local authority would do it was early on a Saturday morning. Making sure the mobile crane and all the trucks arrived at the right time became a question of military precision. But that was a minor issue. Although at the moment this is just a cottage industry, the advantages are huge and there are important implications in being able to make homes in their entirety off-site."
All the occupiers so far have all been pleased with the experience of living in a box. "The people using them just love them," says John Burton, of Trinity Buoy Wharf. "In fact, although they may have the option of living or working in some Victorian terrace more cheaply, the artist tenants here are happy to pay more rent than they otherwise might just to live in them. They say they suit their image."
I'm reading this wondering, "I woinder what Gina thinks of this...?"
Then I read: "Of course there is a down side to the container house. Namely the reputation. City building permit givers may have the same reaction as Gina (a negative one). But it's important, to not make snap decisions, but look at "All the facts". Which is why I included the nice interior picture (see the pretty picture Gina, don't you see how this can be nice)."
And I laughed so hard! I am sure Kelley would have the same reaction! But, as I think about it Pavel, it makes sense to me!
"I promise to hold you and keep you, and love you forever, even if you make me live in the back of a tractor-trailor!" Ain't love grand?
;-)
LOL
yeah. my friend Stan, was a little put off that she immediately rejected the notion with any discussion or anything.
But he on the other hand, has been really, really into this concept. (I have no idea where he first heard about this). But he would talk about it a few times a day.
Part of the problem. I think is where we do our Cocoa production. Acrossed the street is a container storage area. So he's reminded of it every time we go up there. Which is a few times a week.
Anyway I once had dreams of going back to the desert where the living is cheap. (even relocating to Desert Pastors city, which has a Coptic monastary nearby) And still do...
But it's looking less likely... Gina also isn't fond of the desert (She likes her trees).
So anyway inovative low cost housing would be another alternative...
Housing where I live can be insane. I know before the tech bust, our high priced regions exceeded those in Manhattan Island. I haven't kept tract of it since then.
But if you were to move lets say 20 miles out of town, and use a good prefab still doable. (OR if you want a regular house, you can do the construction yourself, or at least oversee it. Which is what my parents did in the early 90s. But I just don't have any talent in that area whatsoever).
Let's just say, I'm an NP too, and I don't automatically take too seriously the fly-by-night ideas I hear coming from my fellow NP's. ;) The enthusiasm is usually greater on the front end, and less in the execution.
This obviously is not as crazy as it sounds on first blush, but they're still talking about artists' lofts, refugee housing... sorry, honey, if I don't get that cozy, nesting feeling from the idea... :) I also keep thinking, what about the rust???
I think they got the rust covered..
first of all they are made to be used aboard ships. So that must not be that much an issue. Because if nothing else they are painted..
Secondly, they are basically used as a skeleton/ fame work. I mean sky scrapers have steel girders as their basic frame work. So you've got the same basic principle at work. I would say that rust, is probably less an issue than lets say termites, which we have lots of here by the way...
I do recall them saying in an article to paint the house, once every 4 years. Which is I think much more often than a regular house (Which I think is more like 8-10 years). That might be due to the rust issue....
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