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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. — New Atlas
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: StarbucksJust last month, Starbucks announced its plans to design, build, and operate... View full entry
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... View full entry
From a self-sustaining city to refurbished-shipping containers, private sector real-estate developers are offering both big and small solutions — BBC News
Nancy Kacungira looks at how entrepreneurs are tackling the housing crisis in Lagos. View full entry
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.”
— The Atlantic
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... View full entry
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... View full entry
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... View full entry
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.
— marketplace.org
![Left: Paul Rudolph, Oriental Masonic Gardens, New Haven, Connecticut, 1968-71. [Photo via Claire T. Carney Library, University of Massachusetts] Right: Biergarten at Proxy, designed by Envelope A+D, San Francisco, 2012. [Photo by Scott Beale, Laughing Squid]](https://archinect.gumlet.io/uploads/l7/l7dsed1e1yot2o9o.jpg?fit=crop&auto=compress%2Cformat&enlarge=true&w=514 "Left: Paul Rudolph, Oriental Masonic Gardens, New Haven, Connecticut, 1968-71. [Photo via Claire T. Carney Library, University of Massachusetts] Right: Biergarten at Proxy, designed by Envelope A+D, San Francisco, 2012. [Photo by Scott Beale, Laughing Squid]")
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
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... View full entry
