There’s an emerging and innovative solution to the environmental, economic, and housing concerns we face around the globe: shipping container homes.

Few shipping containers come with nice large portholes – not cheap!

It turns out reusing the old containers is an inexpensive, efficient, and environmentally friendly way to build homes that can be used by low-income residents or as temporary housing following a natural disaster.

(Readers must make due allowance for the credulous gee-whiz writing, which flits lightly over numerous practical problems, as we’ll see.)

A decade ago, on vacation in Australia’s Northern territory, we visited Kakadu National Park, where in the midst of a torrential downpour we stayed in the relative luxury of what the guidebook called a ‘donger‘,

Aussie slang for a shipping container cut in half and converted into a single-room accommodation.

Donger in the making?  Just bifurcate and add people

The prefab metal box or can has a long history in makeshift housing, from the Quonset Hut (to the Airstream trailer, up through the increasingly immobile home, whose history I’ve previously told.

Spam in a can?  Newlywed WW2 couple with their Quonset hut

Some day, son, you’ll live in a full cylinder, not just half of one

The Quonset is the American successor to the British WW1 Nissen hut, which was invented (I have just discovered) by a Norwegian-American, Peter Norman Nissen:

The special thing about The Nissen Hut is unbuilt it can fit in the back of a 3-tone truck, making it the first pre-fab house ever. It is made out of corrugated iron with a metal frame; it also has a wooden door and a few oiled cloth widows, instead of glass.

Just follow the badly-photocopied instructions, and four hours later, a structure!

The Nissen Hut was also new and unique because is only took four hours for six men to assemble, the record time was 1 hour 27 min.

Quonsets are scattered about rural America, and because they are unbelievably durable (even if quite Spartan), they attract occupation and reuse:

Rose Cobis had been a squatter in this Quonset hut for years before she purchased it from the city of Kodiak and transformed it into the Quonset home it is today.

Back to the shipping container possibility:

Architects and humanitarians alike have jumped on the bandwagon to make everything from chic urban spaces and stylish homes to disaster relief and affordable housing.

Because they are made of such high-grade corrugated steel, shipping containers make a terrific structural material.  Perfectly orthogonal, they stack, inviting adaptive amalgamation:

Billed as the largest container city in the world, Amsterdam’s massive Keetwonen complex houses 1,000 students.

They are particularly well suited for constructing buildings, as they are stackable and their steel walls are durable, fireproof, and resistant to rust, mold, and termites. Shipping container homes can be constructed for far less cost than traditional building methods and use as much as 80 percent recycled materials.  The homes can also be prefabricated, a method or a system where the structure or its components are manufactured at a facility and transported to the building site.  This reduces the amount of time needed to complete a house, drives down costs, and uses indoor construction, which eliminates interruptions from inclement weather.

Throughout Africa and South Asia, containers are commonly reused for other purposes:

Container reused into bus stop, KwaZulu Natal, South Africa

Container converted into a phone center, Durban, South Africa

Empty containers accumulate [in importing countries] because it is too expensive and wasteful to ship them back to their countries of origin–the United States in particular has a large surplus of containers due to its trade deficit.

The problem thus isn’t using the shipping containers in Africa or South Asia, but getting them to Africa or South Asia.

Gotta get ‘em over the water

Better, I think, would be to enable dismantlement and reassembly, such as with hammered barrels. 

House made of hammered barrels, Cape Flats, Cape Town, South Africa

House made of hammered barrels, Athi River, Nairobi, kenya

Improvability is an intrinsic element of the desirable single-family home.

One organization utilizing this building technique is PFNC Global communities, which stands for “Por Fin Nuestra Casa,” the Spanish equivalent of “Finally, a Home of Our Own.” PFNC is in the process of launching their one-unit shipping container home business, and they plan to create housing for people currently living in dangerous or insufficient housing situations around the world. They can put together a unit for less than $10,000.

That’s too expensive for very poor people, as is this New Zealand gimmick, the porta-bach:

Need some flexibility with security? Need a temporary structure or small vacation home? Going off the grid? The Port-a-Bach system from New Zealand’s Atelier Workshop might be a good fit.

Costing around $55,000, Port-a-Bach sleeps two adults and two children comfortably, in a dwelling that folds up into a fully enclosed steel shell.

Nowhere near affordable, even if entertaining.

It comes with large internal storage cupboards and shelves; a stainless steel kitchen; bathroom with shower, sink and composting toilet; bunk beds and dressing room. Fabric screens allow you to shape internal space, as well as shelter the outdoor deck area.

Bach (pronounced Batch) is Kiwi slang for “Bachelor Pad,” and refers to the many small cabins that dot the famously picturesque country.

Nor is this concept house financially feasible:

The Redondo beach house: 1

Some architectural innovators have also used the containers to create sleek, modern, and architecturally stunning homes, apartments, and office buildings. California architect Peter DeMaria built the first two-story shipping container home in the United States in 2006 using recycled steel containers and a combination of conventional stick frame construction and prefabricated assemblies.

The Redondo beach house: 2

The result was a Redondo, CA Beach Home that won the 2007 American Institute of Architects Award for Design Excellence/Special Innovation.

The Redondo beach house: 3

The design resembles the geometric focus, simplicity, and openness of Frank Lloyd Wright.

The Redondo beach house: 4

Unfortunately for affordability, to convert the small, rigid, and dark containers into housing required so much adaptive reuse that the containers are little more than cumbersome wall panels.

Still, with all these metal boxes, somebody ought to be able to do something with them (and there are examples, such as Cargotecture):

The shipping container method is also ideal for creating portable temporary disaster relief shelters. Small units can be constructed quickly and then shipped out to provide people with a roof and basic amenities until they are back on their feet.

The temporary usually becomes the permanent, as our humble Quonset Huts show:

The Quonset hut of St. Patrick’s Catholic Church served as the center of Catholic life in Barrow until 1993. The church replaced the hut with a wood-framed structure.

With some adaptability, and possibly some easy-disassembly features, reusable shipping containers could represent the embryo house, giving people a nexus around which to establish a tenure and tenancy and gradually improve and personalize their homes.

Martie Rozkydal and her granddaughter, Julia Nesslage, beside the hut they painted together, 2003

Not surprisingly, the frontier for such housing in America is Alaska, where they are scattered about the wilderness, attracting home-makers just as dead Australian trees attract birds:

Rose Cobis had been a squatter in this Quonset hut for years before she purchased it from the city of Kodiak and transformed it into the Quonset home it is today.

Be it ever so humble, if it’s ours, we’ll improve it:

Cohoe Studio storage shed painted by artist and proprietor Lee Culhane, 2003, Cohoe, Alaska

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“Missed it by that much.”

As I wrote in that post:

Architects should never have the final say in designing any building.

Property development is susceptible to what I call the ‘ribbon-cutting trap’ – the tendency to declare that completion of the building is a successful finish.  In reality, it’s only a successful beginning, because building is easy, operating is hard.  Maintenance is unforgiving to wishful thinking […] where I come from, water is a property’s greatest enemy. That’s why water and sewer systems are so critical to building integrity, and more fundamentally, why it’s inconceivable to us that housing could exist without water and sanitation.

I got a puckish email from faithful reader Matthew Healy, pointing me to some articles on condensation in vapor barriers by Tim Padfield, whom I presume to be the world’s foremost expert on the physics of building walls.  [If Harvard or MIT hasn't signed him to be an expert witness in their architect litigation, both should.]

A man who knows how glasses do or don’t fog up: Tim Padfield

Mr. Healy pointed me to this great line, which might be said to be the epitaph for Harvard’s Otto Hall: “complicated structures will never be built accurately enough to realise the intentions of their designers.”  In fact, I’m going to christen it Padfield’s Law of Construction Complexity:

Padfield’s Law of Construction Complexity ought to be graven on every foundation stone, pre-printed at the bottom of every blueprint.

“Don’t design what you can’t maintain”

Like a certain blogger we know, Dr. Padfield is a prolific author on a narrow topic, publishing pieces with titles like The interaction of water with paper in small spaces –

Figure 10: The warm wall evaporates water from the paper of the menu, which condenses on the cold glass, runs down and is re-absorbed by the paper. Because the sides of the enclosure are also exposed to the cold, condensation is worse towards the edge of the glass, obscuring the price while revealing the culinary delights on offer to the hungry traveller.

– and How to design climatically stable museums, as well as what reader Healy found, his paper Condensation in the Walls of Humidified Buildings, which describes Otto Hall with painful clarity:

Many museums in temperate climates are humidified in winter to attain the unofficial standard of about 50% RH at a comfortable temperature around 20C [68º Fahrenheit – Ed.]. Air conditioned museums are also usually pressurised, to prevent unauthorised entry of air that has not been filtered and humidified. The inside air will tend to flow and diffuse out through the walls.

Otto Hall had both.

Otto Hall: you wouldn’t know the skin was crumbling

As the air, together with its burden of water vapour, passes through the wall it will cool down. The relative humidity will consequently rise, if one assumes that water vapour moves at the same pace as the other constituents of air. We can use the atmospheric moisture calculator to show that air at 50%RH at 20C will reach 100% RH [Dew point --- Ed.] at 9C [50º Fahrenheit – Ed.].

On a cold winter day this temperature will be reached at some point within the wall. Water condenses there and may later freeze. The water will also dissolve salts and move them around in the wall and will accelerate corrosion of metal fittings within the wall. The process is shown in the diagram. The temperature gradient is drawn diagonally down through the wall section. The picture also hints at a process that partially counteracts this process: water can evaporate from the outer surface of the wall.

Deposition of water in the wall is therefore dependent on several competing processes: diffusion of air through the porous wall, flow of air through cracks in the wall, absorption of water into the hygroscopic brick and finally, mixing of the humid air originating from inside the building with outside air in the outer layer of the wall.

Engineers have responded to this threat to the durability of the wall by inserting a barrier to air flow through the wall, usually a polyethylene foil. Other professionals in the building trade then make holes in the barrier to insert electrical cables, bolts, pipes and just nails.

Just what happened in Otto Hall.

This has resulted in some spectacular failures of buildings that were designed with an attention to detail appropriate to constructing a jumbo jet but built in the more relaxed tradition of the building industry

You sure about the assembly here?

As he continues, low-tech means low-maintenance-risk:

I have never seen comparable phenomena in the simple, solid walls of uninsulated, porous brick that are typical of older houses that are used as museums. This must be because the fine balance of processes described [above] results in a wall that is seldom wet, even in very cold weather.

It seems to me that museum designers should be investigating the advantages of walls of homogeneous, porous material with thermal insulation distributed evenly right through the wall section. This will avoid the cracks, steep temperature gradients and impermeable layers that cause water to accumulate. It will also tend to make walls that have a large thermal inertia, which provides extra stability to the inside climate.

In another essay, The Window in Context, Dr. Padfield observes

“Designing a structure that is robust enough to [work even if] badly built and intermittently maintained is just as important to the life cycle costs as is the energy consumption from day to day.”

These principles apply equally well to financial structures.  When I was young and foolish, I liked very complex financial rules, incentives, and compensation structures.  As I’ve had more experience [you mean, aged -- Ed.], I’ve simplified rulemaking extensively, believing that simple rules not only after a better chance of being followed – fuzzy boundaries are bad boundaries – but also, they serve as better motivation.  That’s led me to this rule of thumb on joint ventures:

Rule number 1: measure twice, cut once

The best one says, “what’s mine is yours.”

That joint-venture-rule-of-thumb works well in my marriage, too J.

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