The Pioneers of Shipping Container Architecture Make a New Case for the Genre With This Prefab House

It was in the early 1990s that Giuseppe Lignano and Ada Tolla, lifelong friends and founding partners of the design firm LOT-EK, stumbled on a giant depot of shipping containers in (where else?) New Jersey. "We immediately saw a huge potential in this object, from both an ecological and an artistic perspective," says Lignano of their realization that the ubiquitous vessels could be upcycled into architectural building blocks. "But we didn’t know anything about containers when we first started playing with them."