Intermarine is a marine logistics and ocean transport provider focusing on the needs of breakbulk, heavylilft, drybulk, and project cargo with a fleet of more than 55 advanced multi-purpose vessels. The project is located at an industrial terminal – a 95 acre site directly adjacent to the Houston Ship Channel functioning as Intermarine’s primary load and staging center for cargo and projects. We started the project with a myriad of site and building configurations to optimize the building’s potential to serve as a business development strategy for the company. We sited the building at the terminus of Industrial Road and then dodged every existing subterranean obstacle imaginable with the building’s relatively small foundation – approx 5,000 sf. It functions as both a terminal visitor center for Intermarine’s clients and as a port operations facility.

We pondered the ability of a literal compilation of containers to equate to something architectural like Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67. But in the end, the literal use of containers provided something a little less than architectural form – untransformed.

We decided that artifice was the active catalyst to architecturalizing the containers. Referring to the containers opened iconographic and spacial opportunities that actually using them cannot. No shipping containers were harmed during the making of this building.

Re-presentation and choreography of the visual Vibe given off by the physical context. Parsing the difference in this case between what we want to see and What we want to see represented- the difference between a cartoonish reaction of stacking shipping containers vs creating an almost impressionistic iconography that by taking clues from a broader local physical / visual context offers a richer integration between form and program.