Archinect - News

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.

Entrepreneurs seek solutions to solve Lagos' housing crisis

2017-01-25T13:24:00-05:00

From a self-sustaining city to refurbished-shipping containers, private sector real-estate developers are offering both big and small solutions

Nancy Kacungira looks at how entrepreneurs are tackling the housing crisis in Lagos.

The enclosure to dismantle Chernobyl's nuclear reactor is complete

2016-04-07T13:07:00-04:00

This month marks the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. On April 26, 1986, technicians conducting a test inadvertently caused reactor number four to explode... Reuters reports that a huge recently-completed enclosure called the New Safe Confinement—the world's largest land-based moving structure—will be “pulled slowly over the site later this year to create a steel-clad casement to block radiation and allow the remains of the reactor to be dismantled safely.”

Although it sounds like an early aughts indie band name, the New Safe Confinement structure over Chernobyl's reactor number four is finally complete, constructed at an estimated cost of €1.5 billion. Meanwhile, neighboring city and officially uninhabitable Pripyat has become a hauntingly photogenic ghost town, as captured in these photos:

For what else is going on in Chernobyl:

Request for Qualifications (RFQ) BoxSpot Architectural Services

2016-03-02T12:37:00-05:00

This post is brought to you by Burten, Bell, Carr Development.

Burten, Bell, Carr Development (BBC), a non-profit community development organization is seeking qualifications from architects with experience designing shipping containers for commercial and/or office space use. The consultant must demonstrate previous experience with container based structures at all phases of development including schematic design, design development, and the construction procurement process. It is the goal of BBC to hire a consultant that establishes a set of approved technical specifications and construction drawings for a modular product line of habitable container structures.

Click here to download a copy of the RFQ

Consultant qualifications will be accepted until March 14, 2016.

RFQ BACKGROUND

Key Partners
Burten, Bell, Carr Development, Inc
BBC is the lead entity in the creation of the Container Retrofitting Business, is a nonprofit neighborhood development organization founded in 1990 that serves th...

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...

Thousand dollar house, million dollar view

2014-03-05T15:29:00-05:00

New homes in America are a lot bigger than they used to be. In fact since 1950 they've doubled in size, to an average about 2,500-square feet per home. And a bigger home generally uses more energy. So one college professor is attempting to trash some of our ideas about home ownership, by sleeping in a six-by-six-foot dumpster. [...] this month, Wilson moved into a sanitized recycling dumpster on the Austin, Texas, campus of Huston-Tillotson University.

The Emergence of Container Urbanism

2013-02-13T14:33:00-05:00

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?

The repurposed shipping container has become a fixture of urban architecture — part of a movement, as Mitchell Schwarzer argues, toward an "urban design as flexible, responsive and electric as the currents that feed it."

On Places, Schwarzer examines the rise of container urbanism from the mid 20th century to now, from Archigram and the Metabolists in the '60s to the pop-up markets and modular housing of today; and he sees in this latest phase a "landmark change" for architecture.

"By facilitating an almost instant building complex," he writes, "the containers put architectural production more in sync with the speed and transitoriness of contemporary life, forcing it to respond to a city’s many complex, adaptive systems."