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containerbay There is growing interest in the use of shipping containers as the basis for habitable structures. These "icons of globalization" are relatively inexpensive, structurally sound and in abundant supply. Although, in raw form, containers are dark windowless boxes (which might place them at odds with some of the tenets of modernist design...) they can be highly customizable modular elements of a larger structure. The projects below are sorted alphabetically (by company or designer's name). In addition to the container-based projects listed below we offer links to useful web sites and relevant books. Selected projects utilizing shipping containers. The Shipping Muse Downtown Houston, Texas, feels like a ghost town. Buildings with tinted windows loom heavily and cast dark shadows on the abandoned sidewalks. Residents rarely spend time here, and when they do, you would hardly know it: 6.3 miles of tunnels connect more than 80 city buildings, pushing pedestrians underground and away from the heat, the humidity, and the possibility of a dynamic urban lifestyle. Though the city lacks visible signs of human interaction, Houston is industrially and economically one of the busiest places in America.
Natural Building Techniques This program offers a wealth of information about construction details and other considerations. It covers adobe block construction, piled adobe (similar to cob), rammed earth, both load-bearing and post and beam strawbale, earthships, earth-sheltering, cordwood, thin-shelled concrete domes, papercrete, earthbags, hybrid structures, and recycling various containers for housing. $29.95 The books shown below are arranged according to when they were published, with the most recent ones at the top. If you click on one of the images you will be taken to a page at Amazon.com where you can find out more about the book.
Would You Live In A Shipping Container? Adam Kalkin isn't the only architect to make homes out of shipping containers. A handful of architects, including Jennifer Siegal and Lot-Ek, began using them ten years ago as a gritty reaction against the tidy white surfaces of modernism. But nobody has employed shipping containers more inventively than Kalkin, a New Jersey architect and artist who has used them to design luxurious homes, museum additions, and refugee housing. Sustainable Living Skills: Stone Masonry, Log House, Alternative Construction. Build your own home! Building on a Budget "Our house may look expensive, but the reality is that we only have about $10 a square foot into it. The whole house cost about as much as the average new car. Yet I have seen some million dollar homes that looked like junk. Appearance, like energy efficiency, is more a product of design than of cost. You can take the same materials and arrange them poorly or arrange them well." "With a combined income averaging $10,000 to $12,000 a year we lived simply and invested everything we could in building materials.
Urban Rio, Panama's First Affordable Green Container Project UPDATE 3/16/09 – Urban Core International has gone dark. The website was shut down. If you have any concerns, feel free to contact us. The 7 Most WTF Houses People Actually Live In #3. The Australian Spinning Carousel House Everingham Rotating House This is one you really need to see in motion to appreciate. Building A House On A Hill: A Guide Building a house on a hill is the best way to take advantage of your view, but can be a costly and complecated project. While the visual impact of your home is sure to be stunning, you need to consider many other building aspects before you begin. A house on a hill must be carefully planned.
Beautiful Home Built from Salvaged Car Parts (Video) Fair Companies/Video screen capture An awful lot of cars end up in junk yards. And that means an awful lot of waste. Green architect Karl Wanaselja has built a stunning home in Berkeley, California using salvaged car panels for siding and minivan windows for awning and windows. But that's just the beginning of how awesome this house is. Cheap (Potentially Free) To Build Houses Theoretically, you could build any house for free, especially in a model such as the resource-based economy that participants in the Zeitgeist movement propose. Realistically, a dwelling could only be built for free to the degree that it was made from local materials. Therefore any design that involves imported materials will very likely have some level of financial (and ecological) cost attached to it in most instances, though as we will see throughout this chapter this is not necessarily so, as we can often use the detritus of industrialised society to produce the sustainable homes of the future. I will look at houses that could be built for free but are likely to cost something, even if it is a fraction of what you would spend on a modern bricks and mortar house.