MVRDV has partnered with KLABU, a social enterprise based in Amsterdam, to design a modular, multi-functional clubhouse aimed at supporting refugees. This collaboration, which began in 2022, is founded on the belief that sports can play a pivotal role in helping individuals rebuild their lives, fostering joy, pride, and hope. KLABU's initiative involves constructing clubhouses within refugee camps, settlements, and urban areas, where they serve as community hubs offering access to sports equipment, activities, and connectivity through Wi-Fi and TV broadcasts.
Almost 500,000 buildings have arrived at the Port of Los Angeles in 2021. Well- not exactly. Over 490,000 shipping containers have arrived, though. If there’s a design trend that has caught the world by storm over the past decade, it’s been the rise in transforming shipping containers into buildings as a form of architecture. But are shipping container buildings just a fad that was used to propel ideas about taking every day or is there more substance to creating giant Jenga-inspired structures?
Reports show that authorities have begun dismantling Stadium 974 after it hosted seven matches during FIFA World Cup, with six group games and one Round of 16 knockout matches. It was also the only stadium built for the World Cup without air conditioning, so it only hosted evening matches. According to the BBC, construction workers moved on the site on 9 December to “take the stadium out of tournament mode.” The structure was designed to be the first FIFA-compliant stadium that can be fully dismantled and re-purposed after the tournament ends. While Qatar called this a “beacon of sustainability,” experts warn that the real sustainability of the scheme depends on several factors, including when and where the stadium will be reused.
The Hilda L. Solis Care First Village (HSCFV), a large-scale interim housing project providing a wide range of amenities for both the unhoused and those in transition, recently opened in Downtown Los Angeles.
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The Citizen Care Pod is designed to deliver testing and screening outside of the pod in accordance with physical distancing best practices.. Image Courtesy of the Citizen Care Pod
The Citizen Care Pod is a new initiative for COVID-19 smart screening and testing, combining intelligent technology with a modular design. Led by the Citizen Care Pods Corporation, the multi-disciplinary team, consisting of Toronto based WZMH Architects, PCL Construction, Insight Enterprises, and Microsoft, collaborated to bring the project from concept to reality in less than a month.
The showpiece of a planned new development at Edinburgh Park will be UK-artist David Mach’s first-ever building, named “Mach 1” by the project’s developers and investors, Parabola. Working with Stirling Prize-nominated architects Dixon Jones, Mach’s building will be created from over 30 shipping containers - but not in the modular, linear method to which shipping container buildings typically lend themselves. Instead its sculptural shape is meant to draw attention to the new quarter and catch the public’s eye, especially those traveling by on the nearby tram.
TRS Studio has unveiled their design for a social project in the Callao region of Peru. The single-family module is based on a cargo container, constructed with strong materials emitting a low cost, and low environmental impact. The project is founded on community participation, improving the quality of health and housing in the Pesquero II settlement through sustainable materials.
"The rooms are awash with sparkling candelabra, sumptuous carpets, marble columns, sculptures, and expensive artworks,” says Benedikt Hartl, co-founder of Opposite Office of Buckingham Palace. The 775-room, 79-bathroom, 828,821 square foot residence has been home to Britain’s royalty since the 1830s. And, if Opposite Office’s recent Affordable Palace proposal were to go through, could also be home to you.
UAE based architects Mouaz Abouzaid, Bassel Omara and Ahmed Hammad have designed a shipping container housing project for Cairo, Egypt. Dubbed ‘Sheltainer’, the project aims to address a need for low-income, student and refugee housing. The design focuses on Egyptian life around a single house unit with all the necessary needs for a small family. Sheltainer aims to offer a flexible solution with new open spaces, activities and homes.
Hot on the heels of its lavish breakthrough Milan store, Starbucks has opened yet another striking and innovatively-designed coffee house. However, Japanese architect Kengo Kuma's design associates an entirely different mood with the company's coffee beverages.
Starbucks Taiwan the company’s first location in the Asia Pacific, consists of 29 white shipping containers, shifted and stacked in a grid-like formation. Within the containers’ 3,444 sqft (320 sqm) of space are a variety of intimate and comfortable spaces. A drive-thru is also incorporated into the design to maximize the store’s convenience to its customers.
Shipping containers, once a darling of architectural upcycling, have received a lot of criticism recently, as architects are beginning to recognize that their perceived advantages—ready-made habitable space and structure, and an opportunity to recycle a widely available material—are based in little more than hopeful PR spin. But for one of the most prominent practices which regularly uses shipping containers in their work, LOT-EK, the attraction of these architectural ready-mades always went beyond the ecological and practical rationalizations provided by others. In this interview at the firm's New York studio, part of Vladimir Belogolovsky’s “City of Ideas” series, LOT-EK founders Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano discuss the conceptual foundations of their fascination with shipping container architecture.
Bee Breeders have announced the winners of the Construction Container Facelift architecture competition. The competition jury received a wide range of work, but selected proposals which were based on a realistic implementation of a novel solution, maintaining the inherent durability and functionality of the shipping containers versus altering them strictly for aesthetics.
With the green premise growing in popularity across the globe, more and more people are turning to recycling shipping containers as a way to reduce the extremely high surplus of empty shipping containers that are just waiting to become a home, office, apartment, school, dormitory, studio, emergency shelter, or anything else. The conversion of shipping containers to living spaces is not a new concept.
Shipping containers have become a more common architectural tool over the past few years. Through clippings, insertion of external elements, coatings, and equipment, the container is adapted according to its future use and desired aesthetics. See below 10 examples of works that adopt the use of containers.
The conversion of shipping containers to living spaces is not a new concept—but being able to purchase them online and have them delivered by e-commerce giant Amazon is. Deliveries by the Seattle-based (and seemingly endlessly expanding) company are becoming a staple for most American households: dogs have never barked so much at the postman, porches have never been so littered with empty boxes, and never before has almost every product on the market been available from one place without even having to leave the house.
In spite of this consumer revolution, homes on demand constitutes new territory for the platform. So what does it look like when an entire house is delivered on the back of a truck?
Structural prototype by the makeLab™at LTU. Image courtesy of LTU
Detroit is a long-standing symbol of innovation in America, especially in the production of automobiles, music, and, at one point in history, airplanes. It has, correspondingly, been called the Motor City, Motown, and the Cradle of Democracy. Over the last half-century, racial tension, urban migration, and disinvestment have shifted the city’s identity, causing it to become a symbol of post-industrial America and the attendant urban deterioration. Together, these elements render Detroit’s more recent nickname—the Renaissance City—tragically ironic.
