Here's another example of how thinking outside the box, or perhaps in this case thinking about the box, can lead to some very interesting benefits.
Shipping containers.
It seems that some people are now turning them into houses, and they are not what you'd expect.
Shipping containers find new life as homes
Inexpensive and abundant, they’re turning into affordable housing
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. - This takes a little inside- and a whole lot of outside-the-box thinking. What looks like and lives like a house is actually a shipping container.
"I call it my bunker," says Rosalynn Kearney of her container home.
Used to import almost everything we use and wear, shipping containers are now a new concept in affordable housing.
The containers are claimed to be hurricane-proof, fire-resistant, and there's not a termite to be found.
With America exporting so little, shipping companies face the dilemma of what to do with these 32,000-pound containers. Increasingly too expensive to ship back overseas empty, these steel boxes — which can be as large as 20-by-48-feet — are stacked high, sitting in ports around the country. There are as many as 300,000 containers, by some estimates. And they're cheap — ranging from $500 to $2,000 for an unused container.
In hurricane-prone Florida, more container houses are going up, though when finished you'd hardly know they're different from any other house.
"In the spirit of recycling, we're able to take a product that is just sitting idle and recycle it and put it to a use in a way that helps solve our country's affordable housing crisis," says Askia Muhammad Aquil of St. Petersburg Neighborhood Housing.
Atlanta wants 300 units of multistory housing using the containers, and California wants four stories of them for the elderly. In just one day, a crane and a welder can have a container house ready to finish. If time is money, builders say containers are both.
"We can build it for 65 percent of the buildout cost anywhere in the U.S., and it can be built in half the time," Soren Ludwig with Sustain our World says.
And containers don't have to look like boxes. They can be trendy or affordable, with or without "the look." In fact, the biggest hurdle in having one may be getting used to sleeping in the same box your imported pajamas were shipped in.
© 2007 MSNBC Interactive
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18475601/
Here's another site, showing some innovative design work :
http://www.fabprefab.com/fabfiles/containerbayhome.htm
This creative concept offers some amazing potential , where cheap housing is needed. It also provides a large range of possible housing, from the ultra inexpensive to the moderate range.
It could easily be used to assist Third World countries, as well as countries in the West. Indeed the fact is that these houses would actually be quite easy to transport, based on their origins. They could be made in a modular way, and could even be stacked on sites to provide multilevel housing , a critical concern in areas with high population density.
Amsterdam actually has an example of that type of project :
http://www.blablablog.nl/B1038127581/C115502288/E1586963213/index.html
Shipping containers are in many ways an ideal building material. They are strong and resistant to the elements while also being durable and stackable, simplifying construction. Structures made from them can be disassembled, moved, and then reassembled with ease. They are also quite common and relatively cheap in North America in general and the USA in particular. The relative cheapness is a result of the imbalance in manufactured goods in North American trade. The USA imports much more manufactured goods than it exports and those goods come and go in containers. As a result that country, and to a lesser extent its neighbors in North America, has more empty containers than it can fill and these empties are often made available for uses such as architecture.
The Nomadic Museum is composed of 152 shipping containers. It was constructed to house a photography exhibit in New York City in 2005, was dismantled, and was reassembled in Santa Monica, California in early 2006.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shipping_container_architecture
There's even a container city in London :
Containers are an extremely flexible method of construction, being both modular in shape, extremely strong structurally and readily available. Container Cities offer an alternative solution to traditional space provision. They are ideal for office and workspace, live-work and key-worker housing.
Container Cities do not even have to look like containers! It is a relatively simple matter to completely clad a building externally in a huge variety of materials.
Finally the benefits of Container Cities can truly be seen in short and medium term land use projects. Short-life sites can have Container Cities that simply unbolt and can be relocated or stored when land is required for alternative uses. To date this alternative method of construction has successfully created youth centres, classrooms, office space, artists studios, live / work space, a nursery and retail space.
http://www.containercity.com/index.php?id=1
The strange thing is that something like this is relatively unknown here, when it could offer so much potential to people all over the world. Small communities could be made, quite quickly and efficiently, to provide low cost housing for people.
That would also empty the current inventory of such containers that now lie around the country unused, and provide needed jobs and housing while doing so.
If a concentrated effort was made, these same communities could also provide the chance to recycle other materials now wasted, be environmentally friendly , and even become a self financing project - if done with architectural students, volunteers, and the home owners themselves (using the Habitat model) .
Since that could be done anywhere , and the product shipped anywhere, then it makes for a much more flexible model for affordable housing. Since the cost would be so low, it could easily be paid off by the homeowners with low mortgages, perhaps in it's own centralized fund. Even if that mortgage was defaulted on, the actual structure might easily be moved somewhere else and another owner could take over it.
So , anyone else out there see this as a brilliant idea just waiting to be capitalized on ?
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