Imagine living in a home that has seen more of the U.S. — or the world — than you have.
That can be the case when a person lives in “cargotecture,” individual homes or apartments made from recycled shipping containers. It gives a whole new twist to the term “mobile homes.”
Cargotecture, an offshoot of modular building, is still in its nascent stage, with projects sprinkled throughout the U.S. and featuring various sizes of containers that once held products but now hold people.
One example is Box 500 Apartments at 543 S. 500 W., Salt Lake City, which has six stories of apartments that range from studios up to two bedrooms and one bathroom.
Modular single-family homes also are cropping up in the U.S. and elsewhere, with its parts manufactured at a plant and then assembled at the construction site.
“Modular can help solve this [housing] crisis,” McCall Judd, director of strategy at Synergy Modular, said at a ULI (Urban Land Institute) Utah event in Salt Lake City. “It can actually be the solution.”
With offices in Seattle and Arizona, Synergy Modular has used modular methods to build Cheatham Street Flats in Texas, consisting of 143 units of student housing, retail and restaurant space and two levels of underground parking; Crest Steel in Riverside, California, consisting of single-story office space; and a mixed-use building in Washington that has one story of basement parking, one story of commercial office space and housing support at street level, and four stories of studio and one-bedroom dwelling units of affordable housing.
Shipping container living has its obvious limitations. Ceiling heights are usually 8 feet, 10 inches at most, but flooring and roof insulation can reduce that figure. The interior width is likely to be about 7 feet.
But container houses and apartments typically are quicker to build, are cost-effective, durable, semi-permanent, architecturally interesting, and eco-friendly because they are made from recycled materials.
In Minnesota, one project is spread across 16 sites and consists of 126 modules for 84 units, with construction 33 percent quicker than that of a traditional project. BlackBox Container Studios says its single-use shipping containers can be converted into cabins, guest houses, offices, safe rooms, garden sheds, retreats, wood shops, in-law suites and game rooms, among other uses.
British Columbia, Canada, has a nine-story hotel, plus a home made from four recycled containers that is rented out via Airbnb. The Atira Women’s Resource Society’s recycled shipping container housing development in Vancouver has six social housing units for older women as well as six rental units. Atira says the project was inspired by BC Hydro’s “House of the Future,” a recycled-shipping-container housing demonstration project built on the front lawn of BC Hydro’s downtown office during the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.
While studio units there range from 280 to 290 square feet net living area, Atira touts the benefits of shipping containers as having the ability withstand whatever Mother Nature can throw at them. It says estimates are that the world has 24 million vacant shipping containers, and repurposing them “is good for the environment, provides a base structure that reduces the cost of construction and construction timelines” and they look great.
Other examples include temporary workforce housing of 15,000 square feet in a complex at a Canadian Forces Base offering 90 bedrooms, 24 bathrooms and six laundry rooms; Potter’s Lane, an affordable housing project with 16 480-square-foot living spaces for homeless military veterans in Southern California; apartments in Texas consisting of two buildings with four levels each; a three-story container building in Washington, D.C., that has two sets of nine containers; 100 apartments in a four-story student apartment complex in France; 13 residences made from 24 containers in a three-story project in Phoenix; and eight residents made from 16 containers at a two-story project also in Phoenix.
Whether container housing or not, the number of modular projects is rising, and Judd wants more manufacturers and developers to learn about it. “It’s not going to work for every project. It’s not going to work for every area. … There are limitations, and we still have a long way to go,” she said.
“I want this industry to grow and I want everybody to know about it, because it’s coming.”