Shipping Containers

Shipping containers aren't exactly charming but they are cheap, and people on a budget are living quite comfortably in them.  In Amsterdam, Keetwonen is the biggest container city in the world (1050 shipping containers).  Students pay $410 Australian dollars a month for their own bathroom, kitchen, bedroom, study room, large windows, automatic ventilation and last but not least,  their own balcony. 

The student complex also houses a cafe, sports area and a supermarket.

Many people buying a home would turn their noses up at them but they can be customised and built faster than a traditional-style home.  The steel walls are a mission to cut into so you're basically left with a long, narrow unit to play with.

Musicians use the humble shipping container as a sound-recording studio and performing artists convert them into travelling theatres.  Boxed living is fast becoming the holy grail of cheap housing and people all over the world are embracing the steelframe volumetric building.

The world's first recyclable hotel in London was made out of 86 steel containers stacked on top of one another and bolted together.  It was cheap and fast to erect and could also be recycled.  In addition, it can be moved to another location.  Another modular hotel at Heathrow Airport is totally carbon neutral i.e. having no net impact on the environment.  It is heated via ground-source heat pumps i.e. water pumped 30 metres deep into the ground where the thermal temperature is approximately 50 degrees. The steel-frame volumetric buildings or cellular volumetric buildings come from the same technology as shipping containers and they have never transported or held cargo.  They are conveyed around the world on ships.  The modules are decked out in China, i.e. they are fitted out with power points, bathrooms and plasterboard walls.  They are manufactured in a factory which means the modules are high quality because an assembly line equals quality control and the manufacturing process is the same many times over.

A friend of mine at Twitter, AlternativeNRG, would love this article for obvious reasons, but being an American, I bet he doesn't know that the floors and ceilings of the modules are lined with 25-millilitre thick Australian eucalyptus plywood.  For those of you who don't know, eucalyptus comes from the Gum tree, and Gum trees are a renewable source which means that they grow to maturity in approximately 15 years. 

There is a huge demand for the shipping container modules and the waiting lists for people who want to rent or buy them is astronomical.  So back to my question, would you live in a shipping container?  Please do one of three things before you leave:  rate me, leave a comment or add me to your list of friends.  Many thanks for taking the time to read my article. 

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