vado retro summed up the design "a box within a box and one box the one inside, the inside box is at an angle. oh and there are trees" but Alex Gomez added "Although the facade is superficial, I feel it will succeed in attracting ‘qualitative and quantitative tourist flows in the area,’

The couple bought a 20-by-40-foot piece of land at 351 Keap St. in 2008, trying to get ahead of the wave of gentrification they feared would soon price them out of Williamsburg. Initially, they planned to build a tiny home out of bricks and mortar, but when they put out a bid, it came back as potentially costing half a million dollars. — dnainfo.com

It is in empty spaces like [under Hong Kong's overpasses] that a group is campaigning for the government to build youth hostels, arts performance venues, offices for small- to mid-sized businesses and, most intriguingly, temporary housing. The group sees this unused land as an opportunity to alleviate Hong Kong’s problem of young people not being able to afford to rent in the world’s most expensive property market. — smartplanet.com

In its most far-reaching aspects, container urbanism proposes to take the fundamental organic/architectural condition of containment further by exploring how a boundary might be better coordinated, even merged with the flow of material/ideas. Can containment equate more closely with transmission and, in so doing, position architecture and urbanism more in line with societal mobility and change? — Places Journal

A Seattle firm, HyBrid Architecture, has used shipping containers to build cargotecture one-room cabins and multistory office parks.

HyBrid co-founder Robert Humble says the containers pose some specific challenges: They have industrial paints and coatings to deal with, and they're just steel boxes with no real frame. But essentially, he says, it's a building material. — npr.org

This week the Whitney Museum inaugurated a brand new exhibition and studio space designed by shipping container architects-extraordinaire LOT-EK. An ultra-modern and eco-friendly addition to complement the museum's 1960s concrete brutalist construction, the new structure was commissioned by the Whitney as a space where the museum could hold special exhibits and house activities for the Whitney education program. —

Converting a standard shipping container into a sustainable source of energy for remote or disaster-torn regions, a team of Princeton University students took top honors in an 18-month national competition that culminated April 21 and 22 on the Washington, D.C., Mall. — princeton.edu

We already suspected the Starbucks of the future might be serving a whole lot of juice. Now, it looks like tomorrow’s Starbucks cafes might be rectangular and metal — and look suspiciously like shipping containers. — blog.seattlepi.com

Built on a temporary site and made entirely from recycled shipping containers, London's latest retail park lays claim to be the world's first ever "pop-up" shopping mall. The aptly-named "Boxpark" opened for business today along a vacant strip of east London's fashionable Shoreditch High Street. It is composed of 60 standard-size shipping containers, stacked two stories high and five rows wide. — cnn.com

Both the two- and three-story buildings, quakeproof and made from freight containers, were designed by architect Shigeru Ban. The second and third floors have balconies. Units are built in a staggered fashion to curb noise disturbance. — japantimes.co.jp

In a move that could be viewed by some as a regression to the late 1800s when convicts were shipped from England to Van Diemens Land (Australia), a local prison will next week begin a trial housing inmates within shipping containers converted into maximum security cells. Political proponents calim they are safe, secure and cheap; civil libetarians say they are inhumane and not secure.   — Inhabitat

Staxxon’s primary objective is to develop a vertical folding and nesting method for empty containers that removes the most expensive commodity container cargo – air – and replaces air with folded and nested empty containers that meet existing CSC structural and weathertight standards for dry containers when unfolded. — gcaptain.com