Shipping Container Condos

You've heard of reduce, reuse, recycle, but a developer in Salt Lake City is taking the idea of "reuse" to new levels. City Center Lofts, a seven-story condominium complex under construction in downtown Salt Lake City, will be constructed largely from shipping containers. Yes, that's right--those big steel rectangular boxes that you see on trains and trucks everywhere are becoming housing.

Designed by shipping container specialist Quik-Build of Bernardsville, N.J., with Cooper Roberts Simonsen Associates as the local architect, the building will house eight residential condo units and an art gallery. It will be constructed of approximately 50 percent recycled content by weight, and will include such green amenities as no- or low-VOC finishes, low-e high-performance windows, on-demand hot-water heaters, bicycle storage, a green roof, and water-efficient landscaping. (Not-so-green features will include garage space for each unit. Not every city has the subway!)

Architects in the emerging field of shipping-container housing believe it will be the first building of its kind in Utah and the tallest such structure in the nation. It is scheduled for completion in March 2009.

Our research also turned up another inspired architectural team whose re-use of shipping containers spans the continents. Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano, partners at NYC-based LOT-EK (pronounced low-tech) came up with the innovative idea of building with re-used large industrial objects - including shipping containers, airplane fuselages, tanks, and truck bodies - in the early 90s. The team more recently designed a store for Uniqlo, a Japanese clothing manufacturer, using shipping containers, and that success inspired another developer to bring them in to design a huge retail project in Beijing. Sanlitun South, a 250,000-square-foot, four-story building, incorporates 151 shipping containers. They are also working on an 11,000-square-foot, three-story mobile shipping-container building entirely for Puma. This building, which will contain three stores, offices, a lounge/bar, and several open spaces, will open in Alicante, Spain in early September and then travel around the world for two years. It will be the first building that is both completely mobile and completely made out of containers.