If you’re a modern modeller with too many shipping containers, and who also has a few tight spaces in need of buildings, I have one word for you: “Cargotecture.”
Cargotecture is the word for the way some people today are recycling old shipping containers, turning them into homes, stores, kiosks and Starbucks coffee shops. In England, a whole mall (OK, it’s not a big mall), called Boxpark, has been made out of them.
Using shipping containers in unique ways may be new to Europe and North America, but handy and resourceful people in Africa have been re-purposing them for decades. In the 1990s I saw them used as offices and hospitals in Eritrea, for example.
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| This . . . |
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All this to say that if there’s no shortage of imagination when it comes to finding new ways to use common objects,like containers on the prototype, there’s no reason to limit it on our (modern) layouts, either.
Nice post, John. I saw one of those fold-out coffee shops in a 20' container in a corner parking lot on Bloor Street in Toronto. Very cool, except for the nearby noisy gas generator keeping the java flowin'.
ReplyDeleteHere in Kingston, a developer stacked four of his containers two high/two wide, and hung a large sign promoting the new apartment building going up on the site. Top two containers later removed, as I think the wind off Lake Ontario may have posed a tipping hazard.
Creativity knows no boundaries, and can't be contained.
Thanks for sharing,
Eric