Archinect - News

MIT team tests open-source cooling chamber using 75% less energy than refrigerated cold rooms

2023-07-27T11:18:00-04:00

MIT researchers have published details of a new open-source forced-air evaporative cooling chamber. Described as being less expensive than refrigerated cold rooms, the chamber is intended to offer accessible cold storage for smallholder farmers, as well as significantly reduce post-harvest waste in hot and dry climates.

The chamber, which can be housed in a used shipping container and powered by either grid electricity or solar panels, has a capacity of 168 produce crates. The design uses industrial fans to draw in hot, dry air, which is passed through a porous wet pad. This creates cool, humid air that is directed through crates of produce, allowing rapid cooling. The air is then directed through the raised floor and to a channel between the insulation and the exterior container wall, where it flows to the exhaust holes near the top of the side walls.

The project was led by MIT Professor Leon Glicksman of the Building Technology Program within the Department of Architecture and Res...

University of Kansas students converted shipping containers into housing for community shelter guests in need of quarantined spaces

2021-11-10T19:46:00-05:00

As part of a program at the University of Kansas School of Architecture and Design, a cohort of students retrofitted twelve shipping containers to serve as private housing for homeless people during the pandemic.

The project, located at Kansas’ Lawrence Community Shelter, is called Monarch Village. It was established in response to the need for adequate quarantine spaces for its population when the Covid-19 pandemic struck in 2020. The initiative is part of the non-profit Studio 804, a comprehensive design-build program offered through the school where graduate students design and build a LEED Platinum project. Monarch Village is the studio’s sixteenth.

According to Studio 804, the dwellings offer much-needed privacy for families while allowing guests access to services at the shelter. It is hoped that this project will be a precedent to move away from housing the homeless in gymnasium-like rooms full of bunk beds, an arrangement that makes isolating impossible.

Construction on th...

Iconic Joshua Tree "starburst" shipping container home is officially on the market

2020-12-18T16:56:00-05:00

London-based architecture studio Whitaker Studio designs a three-bedroom, three-bath single-family residence near California's Joshua Tree National Park. While soothing desert views are always a plus, what makes this particular home so appealing is its looks and configuration.

The project idea was unveiled in 2017, and since then, visuals for the "starburst house" became a media sensation with its unique shape and clustered shipping container construction. Each shipping container segment ends with windows providing views of the surrounding landscape. Each shipping container is positioned at varying angles as it comes together at the center of the home.

Image courtesy of Whitaker Studio

With its stunningly realistic visuals, the home has not even started construction yet, the house is up for sale and listed at $3.5 million. An ideal desert getaway the studio interest for the property has only continued to increase.

Santa Monica real estate firm engel...

Carlo Ratti Associati complete COVID-19 medical pod prototype

2020-04-21T11:51:00-04:00

Carlo Ratti Associati has completed and installed the first unit of CURA in Turin, Northern Italy. Previously reported on Archinect, we reported on the project, which stands for "Connected Unites for Respiratory Ailments" was spearheaded by Carlo Ratti Associati and Italian architect Italo Rota. The concept utilized shipping containers to develop a modular system of pods for treating COVID-19 patients. Met with confusion, some were uncertain of the feasibility of the proposal, but now the first steps have become a reality.

The plug-in Intensive-Care Pods converted from shipping containers have come to fruition in just four weeks following their initial launch. The speed of the design and production effort come as a result of an international task force that, in addition to designers from Carlo Ratti Associati with Italo Rato, include engineers at Jacobs and health technology company Philips for medical equipment supply.

Initial concept renderings.

With the goal to improve the efficie...

Carlo Ratti and collaborators propose CURA: emergency COVID-19 medical pods inside converted shipping containers

2020-03-30T17:47:00-04:00

In an effort to rapidly boost effective medical response to the devastating COVID-19 outbreak, an international network of architects, engineers, doctors, military experts, and NGOs have developed an open-source solution to convert shipping containers into plug-in Intensive-Care Units. A first prototype is currently being developed in Milan, Italy where the pandemic has hit especially hard.

The project, called CURA (Connected Units for Respiratory Ailments, and also "cure" in Latin), was initiated by Italian architect, engineer, and director of MIT's Senseable City Lab Carlo Ratti with fellow Italian architect Italo Rota.

Image courtesy of CURA/Carlo Ratti Associati.

"CURA is a compact Intensive-Care pod for patients with respiratory infections, hosted in a 20-foot intermodal container with biocontainment (thanks to negative pressure)," explains the project description. "Each unit works autonomously and can be shipped anywhere. Individual pods are connected by an inflatable structure...

Do shipping containers really make for great architecture?

2019-09-16T08:00:00-04:00

A month ago, Dr. Richard J. Williams of the University of Edinburgh expressed his views of the over-hyped shipping container design fad in The New York Times. Describing the fatal flaw in logic widely used to promote the use of shipping containers in recent architectural proposals, Williams writes, "They’re great for doing what they were designed to do, which is transporting stuff. A simple technology, they have helped facilitate global trade like no other. But they’re designed for things, not people."

Throughout the article, Williams, who is a professor of contemporary visual cultures, art, and history, expressed his dislike for the containers and the effort it takes to turn these large transport boxes into habitable structures suitable for human occupation.

Without missing a beat, Williams also dives into the underlying brutality these containers evoke when he writes, "They’re not even particularly cheap. It is often said that they are sustainable, as they adapt an abundant, read...

Kengo Kuma recycles 29 shipping containers for this new Starbucks store

2018-10-04T15:59:00-04:00

The Hualien Bay Mall Starbucks consists of 29 shipping containers and has a total floorspace of 320 sq m (3,444 sq ft), spread over two floors. The containers have been reinforced, modified for glazing, and are painted white. The building's interior, which wasn't designed by Kuma, includes a brightly-colored wall mural representing Taiwan's aboriginal Amis people and offers views of a nearby mountain range.

Kuma has worked with the global coffee giant before, having designed the, now iconic, store in Fukuoka, Japan, and will also be the exterior architect of the upcoming Starbucks Reserve Roastery in Tokyo.

Photo: Starbucks

Just last month, Starbucks announced its plans to design, build, and operate thousands of eco-friendly stores globally by 2025, and the company sees recycled-shipping-container stores as part of this strategy (there are already several other Starbucks stores built from containers, 45 of them in the U.S.).

Here some photos of the interior design, which Kuma however was not in charge of.

Photo: Starbucks

Amazon now sells pre-fabricated container houses

2017-10-07T10:19:00-04:00

The overall look and the customer reviews are not so great, but, if you always dreamed of owning a container that has French doors, Amazon now has it for you! With the rising popularity of the tiny house movement, who knows, we might see those popping around our neighborhoods. Not available on Prime just yet and no free shipping.

Introducing Bjarke Ingels' floating student housing, "Urban Rigger"

2016-09-22T12:48:00-04:00

Bjarke Ingels has found the elusive silver lining in global sea level rise and the European affordable housing crisis in the form of "Urban Rigger," a series of inexpensive student housing complexes that are designed to float in the sea, especially in those cities which have dense urban cores next to the waterfront. The idea here is to provide students with affordable digs that are close to class while simultaneously making the most out of changing climate conditions and post-industrial port repurposing. The first complete Urban Rigger has already been assembled in Copenhagen.

According to an article in FastCompany, "Each unit, which can house 12 students at once, is composed of modular shipping containers. These modules are powered by a photovoltaic array and use a heat-exchange system that draws upon the thermal mass of water to warm and cool the interiors. Meanwhile, an aerogel developed by NASA insulates the interiors."

For the latest on Bjarke Ingels:

Play "Arkinoid" arcade o...

An artist-in-residency is stranded aboard a bankrupt freighter off the coast of Japan

2016-09-08T13:50:00-04:00

Part of the 23 Days at Sea residency, British video and performance artist Rebecca Moss left Vancouver on August 23 in a Hanjin freighter, expecting to dock in Shanghai on September 15. Run by Vancouver's Access Gallery, the residency focuses on issues of globalization, but what ended up happening during Moss's residency, while on-theme, wasn't exactly its goal.

On August 31, with debts amounting to $900 million, Hanjin Shipping Company filed for bankruptcy. Now placed in a receivership, meaning "in the custodial responsibility for the property of others, including tangible and intangible assets and rights", Hanjin was refused entry by Shanghai. It's now stuck in aquatic limbo off the coast of Japan, looking for a place that will allow it to dock. The shipping company is the seventh-largest in the world, accounting for 7% of container trade between North America and East Asia.

In an email to Access Gallery, Moss wrote: “I can’t begin to describe how it feels to look out the window and...

Editor's Picks #434

2015-11-06T11:22:00-05:00

Julia Ingalls highlighted the work of Design Build Research (DBR), based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Currently a non-profit institute led by architect Michael Green and creative entrepreneur Scott Hawthorn, one of the earliest projects was building a theater when TED headquarters’ moved from Long Beach, California to Vancouver.

zenza commented "I was a part of the TED Talk stage design/build (I`m in the last photo actually!). It was a fantastic experience and I learned a lot...Having learned extremely little about construction and the act of assembling things in school, this program offered an awesome addition to my design education."

Meanwhile the latest edition of Screen/Print: featured the October 2015 issue of the Journal of Architectural Education , volume 69: "S,M,L,XL ".

News
Belmont Freeman (principal of Belmont Freeman Architects, an award-winning design firm in New York City) penned an essay questioning whether preservation has become too conservative and elitist? What Eva...

Shipping container village crops up in Oakland, offering alternative to sky-high SF rents

2015-08-03T16:07:00-04:00

Luke Iseman, 31, leases a 17,000-square-foot warehouse in Oakland in which he has built 11 micro residences out of cargo containers, Bloomberg reports. He charges $1,000 per months for each of the makeshift homes, which aren’t legal, strictly speaking. [...] “We have an opportunity here to create a new model for urban development that’s more sustainable, more affordable and more enjoyable.”

More news on shipping containers and the Bay Area's residential market:

Zipper-fastened kaleidoscopic architecture

2014-08-08T13:35:00-04:00

The installation you see above is a project by Masakazu Shirane and Saya Miyazaki called "Wink," their entry into Kobe Biennial's Art Container Contest. The kaleidoscope concept uses mirrors (in keeping with Sir David Brewster's classic), but is also held together by zippers. Shirane and Miyazaki claim this makes it the first "architecture" based on zippers; proving you can create an adaptable, reconfigurable space using the same tech found in your pants.

Results of the [SYDNEY] Container Vacation House competition

2013-12-05T12:39:00-05:00

[AC-CA] recently announced the results of their [SYDNEY] Container Vacation House competition. Entrants had to design a waterfront vacation house on Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia using only a freight container.

Out of 307 proposals, the jury chose three winners:

1st prize (US$3,500): Ales Javurek, Czech Republic (see cover pic)

2nd prize (US$1,700): Eunjin Koh and Jonghyun Kim, South Korea

3rd prize (US$800): Andrew Nicolle and James Moulder, Australia

Images courtesy of [AC-CA].

Home Sweet Shipping Container: NYC Creating Modular Disaster Housing

2012-11-21T14:43:00-05:00

Carved out of shipping containers, these LEGO-like, stackable apartments offer all the amenities of home. Or more, since they are bigger, and brighter, than the typical Manhattan studio. It’s the FEMA trailer of the future, built with the Dwell reader in mind.

Ever since Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans six years ago, the Bloomberg administration has been quietly at work on creating a disaster housing that meets the needs of New York City's unique density and geography. They have created a model system using shipping containers, and while it will not be able to help those left homeless by Sandy, it should be ready by next year, for when the next major disaster hits.