SHIPPED TO ORDER: SHIPPING CONTAINERS GET NEW PURPOSE IN LIFE
By Kellen McAffee
Sometimes thinking outside the box can show that seemingly unconnected problems have common solutions.
Consider this: More than 18 million shipping containers circulate the globe carrying everything from pottery to Porsches. Roughly 700,000 retired shipping containers sit in United States ports and train yards with no apparent purpose beyond rotting, which they are designed never to do.
Home building and domestic energy consumption are major causes of resource depletion and greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Consortium for Research on Renewable Industrial Materials.
Add to that the fact that there are nearly 1 million homeless people in the United States, most in urban areas, and you have a puzzle for urban planners, builders and architects to piece together.
Enter a new wave of innovative builders and architects who have found a common solution: shipping container dwellings.
An Innovative Solution for an Abandoned Problem
City Center Lofts in Salt Lake City is a proposed eight-unit condominium development built out of used shipping containers.
The project is touted to be one of the greenest residential projects in that state, said developer Adam Price. It is constructed from 50 percent recycled material by weight and is certified by the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program.
The site of the project began as an abandoned office building slated for demolition. Instead of just tearing the building down, Price invited the community to “breathe one last breath of life into the building” by using it as a canvas. More than 150 artists turned every square inch of the building into a temporary art project that was viewed in a six-day open house by more than 10,000 people. It was named the best visual arts event for 2007 by the Salt Lake Tribune.
Then it was razed.
In its place will be eight condominiums of varying sizes, including one penthouse. Orange shipping containers will be stacked, with a level of sleek steel and glass frames alternating between each condo level. A standard unit will be three containers wide (about 24 feet across) and will have finished walls, concrete floors with radiant heat and lots of energy efficient windows. A commercial storefront will occupy the ground level space.
The project includes high-efficiency air-to-air heat exchange and HEPA filtration; no-or low-VOC paints, sealants and adhesives; a green planted roof; natural ventilation; low-E, high performance insulated windows; secure bicycle storage at street level; and demand (instantaneous) water heaters.
Price said this project is cutting-edge architecture not just for Salt Lake City but also for the country, as the first mid-rise structure in the United States built out of shipping containers.
A Container’s Life Cycle
Shipping containers are manufactured with heavy-gauge Corten steel to make them strong and fairly impervious to the elements. They are said to withstand fire, hurricane force winds and, most notably for Utah, earthquakes.
They are designed to be stacked nine containers high and hold up against the corrosive elements of the sea. However, they only last for a maximum of 12 years before being retired. Most, however, are still structurally sound at this point.
A Recycled Life
The work of City Center Lofts’ architect, Adam Kalkin, has been described as “truly original industrial grit mixed with poetic touches,” by Dwell magazine.
Kalkin’s company, Quik Build LLC, manufactures container houses at its New Jersey-based facility and then ships them to the site. As with other container building companies, the homeowner is responsible for the foundation work. Some companies also require the client to hire a contractor to build the roof.
Homeowners can move in to their Quik Build home within five months for a cost of roughly $180,000. For an additional fee, the building can be “tagged” by local graffiti artists; something that Price plans to do during the installation phase of the City Center project.
The “Quik House” is made from 75 percent recycled materials by weight. Further green options include solar and wind energy sourcing, a green roof system, and a super-insulating R-50 system.
Kalkin’s designs favor warm and inviting interiors, not the cold and steely environs one might expect from a shipping container.
“It’s not about the container per se, it’s about transforming a commodity into poetry,” Kalkin said in a New York Times profile.
A Building Commodity
Used shipping containers are indeed a commodity with about 12 percent of those 18 million in circulation heading for retirement each year.
“That’s millions of square feet of building space that can be built out of containers,” said David Cross, business development director for SG Blocks, a company that customizes containers to be used in building projects. (SG stands for safe and green.)
There is a domestic surplus of shipping containers because we export far less than we import. It’s sometimes cheaper to build a new container in the developing world than to ship an empty one to retrieve more goods.
Cross said there are about 20 different container projects of varying size and shape in progress around the country at any given time. SG Blocks is owned by Con-Global, the world’s largest shipping container distribution company. It has 17 drop-off locations around the country for used containers. “We’re located at the sources, which cuts out a transportation step in processing,” Cross said.
Before a container can be used in a building, it must be customized. Companies like SG Blocks cut out areas for windows, remove sidewalls, and get them ready to combine with other containers on site.
“Referring to building with shipping containers is like saying building with trees,” Cross said. “The containers are raw materials and must be processed much like trees are milled into lumber.”
The process is much more efficient than producing raw steel.
“A container weighs 8,000 pounds. It takes one kilowatt hour of electricity to melt down one pound of steel, and therefore it takes 8,000 kilowatt hours to melt down a container,” Cross said. “It takes us 400 kilowatt hours to turn a container into an SG block.”
Standard containers are 20 or 40 feet long, eight feet wide and eight feet tall. They weigh between 5,000 and 8,000 pounds depending on the length. They can be purchased used for between $1,500 and $4,000. Shipping can significantly increase the price, so it pays to use local resources.
Green Living
One of City Center Lofts’ many green aspects is walkability. Because of their compact, stackable nature, container buildings can be constructed in dense urban areas—close enough so residents can often walk to work, the grocery store and restaurants.
Container buildings enable developers to deal with unsightly tracts of undeveloped urban land known as Brownfield sites, which are considered too small for traditional developments.
Salt Lake City is no stranger to the problem of urban sprawl. Vast areas of affordable housing spread to the west, south and north of the city and encroach on agricultural land. With limited availability of mass public transportation to these suburban areas, cars and the ensuing daily traffic congestion are a part of life.
The City Center Lofts are located within easy walking distance of several restaurants, a grocery store, several major hospitals, the center of downtown and major public transit routes.
Population Density Concerns
"Density is the next frontier in responding to sprawl and in rebuilding livable urban neighborhoods, but we have an irrational fear of it," said David D. Dixon, principal of Goody, Clancy & Associates in Boston, in an Engineering News Record interview.
Tom Mutter, chair of the Central City Neighborhood Council where the City Center Lofts project is located, thinks the project is intriguing but doesn’t think it’s good for the neighborhood.
“I don’t agree with the height—trying to densify the area right next to downtown, and not downtown,” said Mutter, who is also an architect. “This kills both downtown and the surrounding residential neighborhoods.” Mutter said the council is frowning on the development because council members want to see more single-family homes.
Price said the project is actually very popular and said that two members of the Salt Lake City Council spoke at the demolition of the existing building and endorsed the condo project.
“The thing that makes this project better in Salt Lake than in New York is the relatively few hurdles that we have to jump over,” he said.
Price said there is no basis for an aesthetic review by the city and that the only concern for the city is whether it meets current engineering and zoning requirements.
Although prices for the units have not yet been set, the units will be “high-end,” Price said, in part because of the high cost of land and other fixed costs. “We could not even afford to build this thing out of wood,” Price said.
Multi-Purposed Uses
Though shipping containers are uniform in size and shape, the projects using them are diverse.
SG Blocks is currently building a senior living center at Mission San Luis in Oceanside, Calif., using more than 420 recycled containers. The project looks like a traditional Spanish style stucco development.
Shipping containers are also useful in humanitarian and disaster relief housing. SG Blocks is submitting a bid to replace FEMA trailers in New Orleans with container houses. British architect Eric Reynolds is pushing to solve London’s inner city housing crisis with what he calls “Container Cities.” Global Emergency Housing, a private firm in Toronto, recycles shipping containers into housing units for temporary emergency housing in the event of a natural disaster or political crisis.
Currently, a South African high school hostel is the world’s largest shipping container building. An artist community in Berkeley is built from used shipping containers. Penthouses made of shipping containers are popping up on New York City’s rooftops. Zigloo, another Canadian company, employs what it calls cargo-tecture to build everything from single family homes to tree houses.
SG Blocks has placed a bid to develop employee housing for the 2010 Winter Olympics two blocks from downtown Whistler, British Colombia. This will be a temporary and cost-efficient structure that has a look of permanence but can be easily erected and taken down.
The military has long used containers in war zones and on permanent military installations as secure storage and housing facilities.
Quinten de Gooijer, an architect in Amsterdam, is on the forefront of container building design with his concept of a "flying city”—more than 100 container homes and their residents will travel to cities in Europe for a year at a time.
An Ironic Existence
Like the abandoned building that became a temporary art exhibit, the tension between temporary and permanent is part of the essence of this project and container buildings in general.
Shipping containers transport goods for only a few years, but are built to last forever. Many shipping container developments are built to look and act permanent but are intended to be temporary.
Containers may only be a temporary solution to housing and environmental problems since there is a limit to the number of new containers that can be built from the earth’s resources.
The consumer society that spawned the need for millions of shipping containers is also probably not sustainable in its current form.
However, the City Center Lofts, once constructed, will be built to last.
Editor's note: Image courtesy of Adam Price and City Center Lofts. To learn more about the project, visit www.citycenterlofts.net.