Amazing Homes and Offices Built from Shipping Containers (Cargo Container Home Designs by Architects & Builders)

Amazing Homes and Offices Built from Shipping Containers

Not just for resourceful squatters, container architecture is taking the world by storm. Recycled freight containers bring efficiency, flexibility and affordability to innovative green buildings, from small vacation cabins to movable cafes, schools and skyscrapers. Containers are an extremely flexible construction method, being modular in shape, strong structurally and readily available. Container Cities offer a reasonably priced alternative solution to traditional space provision. They are ideal for office and workspace, live, work and worker housing.
Container Cities do not even have to look like containers! It is relatively simple to completely clad the building externally in various materials.

Finally the benefits of Container Homes or Cities can truly be seen in short and medium term land use projects. Short-life sites can have Container Houses that simply unbolts and can be relocated or stored when land is required for alternative uses. To date this alternative method of construction has successfully created youth centers, classrooms, office space, artists studios, live / work space and retail space.

Overpopulation, migration and mobility characterize life and living today. Natural catastrophes frequently leave thousands of people homeless; indeed, the idea of home is less constant and more fluid today than it was just a generation ago, and personal space is now a luxury, making us reflect on how much space we need.

Container homes are a fast, green, economical and surprisingly flexible alternative to traditional houses as they provide modern dwellings for any household size – from individual to family and community housing. We look at five container dwellings showing how a steel box can be stylish and environmentally friendly.

Written by Simone Preuss

Cargo container homes show no sign of slowing down. With the ever-growing population of disused and deserted shipping containers worldwide, more and more designers are finding creative ways to adaptively reuse containers to create houses and multi-family homes and more.

HybridSeattle is a West Coast architectural firm that has created several real-life shipping container buildings and envisioned several other fixed and mobile architectural designs based on cargo container modules. Built and unbuilt, their work is impressive and just the tip of the architectural iceberg.

Innovative architects turn used shipping containers into homes.

Rammed earth, sod, yak wool, reclaimed wood, oriented-strand board, straw ... nowadays, the smorgasbord of offerings in alternative building methods and materials is staggeringly abundant, if not a little confusing.

On the one hand, architectural innovators advocate prefabrication to make a better "housetrap." With high-tech products and cutting-edge mass production, they are trying to develop a new housing methodology: designerly, affordable, energy-efficient houses built to withstand anything, come hell or high water. On the other hand, some ecological purists have turned to older methods of shelter building. They embrace sustainable resources like straw and dirt, making homes as natural as a footprint in the sand.

Like most new construction, the problem with the prefab movement is that it typically uses less-than-sustainable resources like steel and wood. (True factory production could reduce our ecological footprint by eliminating the waste typical of construction, but that's still quite far from reality.) And the problem with environmentally sound but old-fashioned building techniques is that they require too much time and skilled labour to solve our society's need for affordable green housing on a grand scale.

So where is an eco-friendly homeowner or builder to turn?

In this era of scouring the earth for the magic bullet in home building, few ideas can compete with the weird, pragmatic beauty of the used shipping container. Cheap, strong and easily transportable by boat, truck or train, these big steel structures now litter the ports of America as mementoes of our Asian-trade imbalance. (Many more full containers arrive on our shores than depart, so ports either ship them back empty -- to the tune of about $900 per -- or sell them.)

Hurricane-proof, flood proof, fire proof, these metal Lego blocks are tough enough to be stacked 12-high empty -- and thus can be used in smaller multistory buildings. Used containers (which can be picked up for $1,500 to $2,000) often have teak floors and sometimes are insulated. The bright orange, blue and rust corrugated boxes may appeal to some. But contemporary hipsters find them not just the ultimate in postmodern appropriation but aesthetically pleasing as well.

And even though containers have little of the crunchy nostalgia of the hay-bale house or the yurt, they trump most other forms of green building because, in the current economy, they are virtually a waste product. Making a building (which can last and last) out of what is essentially a huge piece of industrial detritus takes recycling to a new level.

Using shipping containers as buildings is hardly new -- institutions like the military have been using the structures as temporary offices, bunkhouses and showers for some time. Examples of designers incorporating shipping containers into residential designs date back to 1982.

But in the past couple of years, a field known as container architecture has evolved, offering the hope that what was once only a post-industrial pipe dream can emerge as a practical new building form. A handful of architectural firms worldwide -- from New York to New Zealand -- have built prototypes or plans for shipping-container homes. Most of these designers develop each house or project as a one-off. Still, one prefab factory has begun pumping out little container homes not meant for the military encampment or the disaster relief camp. Rather, they are meant for the discerning homeowner avid for something new.

Since his New Jersey factory began production this year, Adam Kalkin has sold a dozen of his so-called Quik Houses, each based on five shipping containers. These are two-story, 2,000-square-foot homes with skylights and enormous glass windows, equipped with three bedrooms and two baths. The price ranges from $76,000 for the basic kit to $160,000 (with all the bells and whistles like a stainless-steel kitchen and mahogany doors), is under $100 per square foot, not including land or foundation.

Kalkin, a celebrated young architect and artist, has made a name for himself by walking a tightrope between the straight-laced world of architecture and the mad land of performance art. His recent creation -- the "Push Button House" -- is an art installation of a "home" built inside a shipping container with mechanized walls that open like a blossoming flower. His Web site, which promotes his prefab container homes and books, also sells kitschy homemade candy ("classic candy melange") and offers a pay-per-minute phone line for your confessions.

Among the custom amenities in the Quik House promotional pamphlet is a $1,000 dinner prepared by the architect in the client's new home. Kalkin also delves into humanitarian work, including collaborating with fashion model Natalia Vodianova on a series of container-based recreational centers for underprivileged kids in her native Russia.

Given his orientation as an artist-inventor -- not a conventional architect, much less a businessman -- Kalkin is a little dismissive when discussing his place in a movement that he characterizes as "very ideological."

He says he never imagined running a construction factory at the forefront of a new building form. "I just like the found-object quality of these things. It wasn't a rational proposition," he said, adding that he is developing houses made of fabrics and other materials that he declines to mention. "I'm not really part of the movement."

Rational or not, his work is in the vanguard of a building form that is gaining mainstream interest and acclaim. Recently, architect Jennifer Siegal used shipping containers in a custom home in downtown L.A., and architect Peter DeMaria designed a container-based home now under construction in Redondo Beach.

Jennifer Kretschmer, an architect based in San Jose who is designing her first shipping container home for a client in Healdsburg, said that she hopes the designers interested in this form can come together and develop standards. "We are all in an experimental field," she said, "with each of us inventing the wheel ourselves. It would be good to share our failures and successes."

If shipping containers are cheap, transportable, stackable, and able to survive most disasters, why haven't they been widely adopted already?

"Building codes -- that's really our big hurdle," said Kretschmer, adding that even though they are stronger than most construction forms, it's hard to convince planning departments of anything so new. Indeed, although some California counties have allowed shipping container construction, Rancho Palos Verdes has proposed building codes that would disallow any shipping containers as housing.

As long as we are trading with Asia," explained Kretschmer, "there are going to be extra shipping containers, so in this sense, it's a very green product. But I would never advocate using new shipping containers."

In this sense, 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 will only overproduce these steel boxes for a while. And even if it does, more than overproduction will be needed 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.

The interest in converting old Shipping Containers into real-world homes is exploding. Following a discussion with an Architect friend about the application of our Home Design software to this design niche I was rather surprised by just how many people are researching and interested in Shipping  Container Homes and Container House Design.

A few years ago we created an add-on module for our Home Design Software for the task of visualization of Shipping Container Modules in the Built Environment; now I am more aware of just how many people are interested in this area, I have decided to make those library modules into a public release of our Home Software.

If you are interested in Shipping Container Design, you might be interested in these two design resources I came across in my research.

The first is a book called Intermodal Shipping Container Small Steel Buildings which is quite a mouth full but its a good resource.

It explains how to purchase steel cargo containers and modify them for use as buildings saving up to 40% over traditional construction methods. ‘

Intermodal Shipping Container Small Steel Buildings is 116 pages and includes photos, diagrams, and plans.

The second is a 200-page Illustrated Manual of Shipping Container Home Design.

This is a 200 Page Illustrated Manual that you can download without waiting for the book shipment.

I have included a series of photographs showing some truly wonderful examples of design genre using this resource – how wonderful they are – who would have thought these beautiful homes began life as humble shipping containers.

Complex Home Design using  Multiple Shipping Containers

The award-winning Redondo Beach House by De Maria Design turns heads with its modern lines and appealing spaces. The luxury beachside showpiece was built from eight prefabricated, recycled steel shipping containers and some traditional building materials. According to the architects, the modified containers are "nearly indestructible," as well as resistant to mould, fire, and termites. Seventy per cent of the building was efficiently assembled in a shop, saving time, money and resources.

One of the containers can even sport a pool! The lessons learned from Redondo Beach House are being incorporated into a line of more affordable, accessible designs, soon available as Logical Homes.

Billed as the largest container city in the world, Amsterdam's massive Keetwonen complex houses 1,000 students, many of whom are happy to secure housing in the city's tight real estate market. Designed by Tempo Housing in 2006, Keetwonen is said to be a roaring success, with well-insulated units, surprisingly quiet and comfortable.

Each resident enjoys a balcony, bathroom, kitchen, separate sleeping and studying rooms and large windows. The complex has central heating, high-speed Internet, and dedicated bike parking.

Keetwonen has proved so popular that its lease has been extended until at least 2016.

Also by LOT-EK is this fantastic concept for a tower at 87 Lafayette Street in New York City. The idea is for a 19-story artists' loft building, built by stacking containers, with staircases at the north and south ends. The roof of the slanted tower would sport solar panels.

The building in front of the bold new design is a historic New York City firehouse, perhaps serving as a visual tie to the past.

Read more: http://www.thedailygreen.com/green-homes/latest/shipping-container-homes-460309#ixzz1nwuF2bYG.

A Big Jump in Battery Capacity

If Envia can overcome some key problems, its technology could cut the cost of electric-car batteries in half.

• BY KEVIN BULLIS

Audio »

Battery packs can cost more than $10,000, which is one of the biggest reasons electric cars cost more than conventional gas-powered cars.

Envia, a startup funded by GM and the U.S. government's Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E), says it has built batteries that store more than twice as much energy as the ones in electric cars now. If the technology comes to fruition, it could halve the cost of batteries—the most expensive part on an electric vehicle.

Much work remains, however, before the batteries can be used in commercial electric vehicles. Among other things, the number of times they can be charged and recharged must be more than doubled.

The technology was highlighted at the annual ARPA-E summit in Washington, D.C., this week, in part to demonstrate the progress in energy technology being made by the Department of Energy, which oversees ARPA-E. The DOE has come under fire after giving loan guarantees to some companies that later declared bankruptcy.

Envia's technology is based on work originating in the DOE's Argonne National Lab, which identified a material with a novel microscopic structure that could help improve the storage capacity of one of the battery electrodes.

GM and battery maker LG Chem, which is using some aspects of the technology in the Chevrolet Volt, may incorporate other technology from Argonne in batteries for the next generation of the car. Envia modified the original Argonne technology to get higher energy densities.

Using the Argonne material as a starting point, the researchers systematically tested variations of the material design to help increase its practical operating voltage (a powerful way to improve energy density) and to deal with a known issue with the material: a tendency of one of its components, manganese, to move out of the electrode and dissolve in the battery electrolyte, reducing storage capacity over time. To achieve these goals, the researchers added trace elements to the material and developed coatings to keep the manganese from escaping.

The company then turned its attention to the opposite electrode, which is usually made of graphite. Researchers decided to use silicon, which can store far more energy but typically works for only a short number of charges, since it swells and cracks. Envia addressed these issues by using a porous form of silicon, which is better able to tolerate expansion and contraction, and by mixing the silicon with various forms of carbon, including carbon fiber and graphite. The carbon is meant to provide a path for electrons to take through the material, bridging gaps that form as the silicon cracks. The researchers also had to modify the electrolyte to keep it from breaking down at the high voltage levels seen in the battery cell.

To develop the materials, Envia took the unusual approach of testing new electrode materials in complete batteries, with both electrodes and an electrolyte. Usually researchers test electrode materials in isolation to identify those with promising properties, such as high energy capacity. But sometimes materials that look great on their own are incompatible with electrolytes or other electrodes. On the other hand, some materials that don't look great on their own may do well when paired with the right electrolyte. So Envia tested batches of 1,500 battery cells—each with a different combination of electrodes and electrolyte—to find the best combinations. (Envia prepares the electrode and electrolyte materials by hand. Wildcat Discovery Technologies, one of Technology Review's TR50 most innovative companies, uses a robotic system to speed up a similar process.)

After testing small coin-sized cells, Envia built cells large enough for use in electric cars. Each weighs one kilogram and stores 400 watt-hours. Commercial lithium-ion batteries store about 120 to 250 watt-hours per kilogram.

Lower-energy batteries often have safety features that make them attractive for use in cars. Sujeet Kumar, Envia's president and CTO, says the company's batteries have passed nail puncture tests, one key test of battery safety.

Because the materials can be made with conventional equipment, they could be relatively easy to commercialize. Kumar says Envia doesn't plan to manufacture batteries itself, but to license its technology to battery manufacturers or create joint ventures.

But the cells aren't yet ready for use in electric cars. To last the life of a vehicle, they need to be able to recharge over 1,000 times and still maintain 80 percent of their original storage capacity. The company is still testing the new batteries, but after only 400 charges, they have dropped to 72 percent of capacity, Kumar says. Solving the problem could require substantial improvements to the electrodes. The cells also have to be put through several other tests of performance and safety before they're qualified for use in vehicles.

Me, My Money, and My Devices

Technology has yet to fundamentally change how we think about money. As the mobile Internet begins to take financial control out of the hands of bank tellers and regulators, innovators are connecting us to our money in new ways.

• BY IGNACIO MAS

Audio »

Technology Review

See the rest of our Business Impact report on The Future of Money.

Money is a common language we all agree to use to convey the of value of things. Since the Chinese starting using cowrie shells as an early form of currency more than 3,000 years ago, societies everywhere have been looking for forms of money that are portable, divisible, durable, and reasonably stable in supply. Over time, money has become less physical and more symbolic: tangible commodities such as gold have given way to tokenized paper and now to ephemeral digits in a computer.

The proliferation of digital communication technologies means we can now marshal our money with remarkable speed and ease—checking balances from a mobile phone, making a payment pretty much anywhere merely by showing a thin slab of plastic, buying and selling stock over the Internet. Yet beyond the transactional speed and convenience, our concept of money and the ways we handle it have not been radically transformed.

Personal Internet banking is convenient, for example, but the services you find online are the same ones that were available when you used to walk over to the branch. You still have to choose among prepackaged accounts. If you move money from your checking to your savings account, the bank remains oblivious to whether you are doing so to put aside money for your kids' schooling or for the family holiday. You can buy a certificate of deposit, but you can't choose the maturity date: why can't you set it to come due the same day you plan to leave on an expensive trip? The banks' failure of imagination is exposing them to disruptive entry by players specializing in customer management and user interface design. Examples includeMint.com, which consolidates all of a user's financial accounts and information in one place, and Simple, an alternative banking service that promises fewer fees and better customer service.

Mobile payments, meanwhile, still seem to many an unnecessary complication. But the appeal of being in constant contact with your money—and information about your money—will prove irresistible. Back in the days when electronic devices were expensive, someone had the clever idea of giving dumb plastic cards to all of us and the more expensive card readers only to merchants. Now that we have a virtual card and card reader right in our pocket in the form of a smart phone, who will be content to carry a credit card we cannot ourselves read?

Banks and card issuers profit from the status quo; Non-banks have stolen an early march on mobile payments in the United States.Google sees mobile payments as a rich new source of customer insight. For Apple, they have been central to building a vibrant developer ecosystem—you can buy an app with the press of a button. PayPal sees the opportunity to attach an account not only to every e-mail account but to every mobile number. The largest mobile payment program in the United States is currently run by Starbucks coffee shops.

Credit scoring is still largely based on personal information, with no social-networking element built into it. That's a missed opportunity to bring to bear what people who know me think about my character and financial habits. Lenddo is seeking to complement traditional credit scores with scores based on people's "social graph"—rewarding borrowers who disclose more about themselves through social networks like Facebook, tapping friends who can vouch for them (without requiring them to guarantee their credit), and creating peer pressure by being ready to disclose delinquencies through the borrower's social network.

On a larger scale, we can imagine monitoring the creditworthiness of the entire financial system. Currently, financial institutions are supervised individually, but there is very little capacity to understand things systemically. This came through loud and clear during the recent global financial crisis. We were caught unaware of the extent to which the risks of various institutions were correlated. The financial system has no "brain" to process systemic risks. But there could be one. I believe it is possible to create a transparent Google-like system for pulling together information about such problems.

For all their desire to take a slice of the banking and payment market, what the new-breed players do not wish to do is to handle customers' cash. They are more than happy to delegate the function of cashing in and out to traditional banks, which operate an extensive infrastructure of ATMs and branches for this purpose. The need for this expensive infrastructure has limited the reach of financial services, principally in developing countries, as there simply is no business case for banks to open branches and ATMs in rural areas or urban slums. The result: about 2.5 billion people in the world do not have access to a bank account—they are trapped in cash, without safe ways to store and transfer their money.

Banks in Brazil were the first to take deposit and withdrawal transactions out of banking halls and into retail shops that exist in every village and neighborhood. If you can find rice and soap and Coca-Cola at these shops, why shouldn't you also find basic financial services there? With the right technology, exchanging money between physical and electronic forms can be done securely, and as naturally as exchanging notes for coins. More disruptively, in Kenya, the mobile-phone operator Safaricom has developed a network of 30,000 stores through which its customers can cash in and out of their M-PESA mobile wallet accounts. That's 200 times the number of branches operated by the largest bank in the country. Five years after launch, 17 million Kenyans—about three-quarters of the adult population—can send or receive money via cell phone.

And what about banknotes themselves—how are they dealing with the technological onslaught? In the arms race against counterfeiters, banknotes have been stuffed with special inks, strips, polymers, and holograms, but still no electronics. I have proposed a new kind of smart banknote that would allow you to do a cash deposit by transferring money from banknote to bank account, directly from your mobile phone. Cash withdrawals would entail the reverse: transferring money from your bank account to a banknote. The banknotes would go on and off as a result, and the on/off status would be immediately visible—say, through digital ink that appears and disappears. You could then transport cash around cheaply in its deactivated form (sorry, Brinks!), and your mobile phone would become an ATM (sorry, NCR!).

I think there will always be some role for cash—a mode of value that has a fixed denomination (do you really want to be exposing your full bank account every time you make a payment?) and always works, even without an acceptance device. Rather than cheering for digital technology to put an end to cash, as some do, it seems smarter to reconcile the benefits of both and find ways to integrate physical cash into the electronic world.

Technology has made it faster and easier to move money around, but it hasn't fundamentally changed how we think of it or use it. Because money and banking are highly regulated, they may be the last of the information-based sectors to be thoroughly shaken by the Internet. The intricacies of regulation make it difficult for banks to be truly customer-centric. But the direction of technological innovation is clear: in the end, nothing will stand between me, my money, and my devices.

Ignacio Mas is a consultant on mobile money and technology-enabled models for financial inclusion. He was previously deputy director of the Financial Services for the Poor Program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a director of global business strategy at Vodafone Group.