Shipping Container

This modular home prototype by Meka is a shipping container clad in cedar.

Tsai Design Studio turned a shipping container into a classroom located just outside of Cape Town, South Africa.

For an adaptive reuse project in Toronto, Levitt Goodman Architects used a shipping container as a visitors' center.

This three-bedroom home in Lille, France, is made up of eight stacked containers.

Finished in 2013, the 3,660-square-foot Casa Incubo was built from stacking and sliding four shipping containers to create a residence and gallery for photographer Sergio Pucci (who took all the photos of his new home). Set on flat ground, the two-story structure ended up being much easier for architect Maria Jose Trejos to complete than a typically constructed home, saving roughly 20 percent of the cost of a standard concrete block design.

Trejos positioned the containers about 60 centimeters above the ground floor, which gives the main gallery and workspace a bit of a sunken feel. The double-level main room offers a spacious interior, perfect for large events and easily altered so it can be utilized as a photo studio for indoor shoots.

The BetaBox mobile prototyping lab is outfitted with a 3D printer, a CNC mill, a laser cutter, and other tools for innovating.

The home was built by two construction workers and the couple themselves, who were familiarized with the construction process and had backgrounds in industrial engineering. “We did not have blueprints for this design, and created only a 3-D model to guile them along the way,” Saxe says.

Atelier Riri devised a creative way to make living inside a shipping container in Indonesia’s tropical climate both comfortable and economical. The architects layered recycled pine, glass wool, and planter mesh on top of the home to help keep temperatures down.

Covered with wire mesh, the green roof will continue to vegetate over time.

Opting for IKEA appliances helped rein in the budget, but the home's greatest cost-saving measure may have been Mike's background in construction. His degree in architectural engineering enabled him to play an active role in both the ideation and execution.

“We wanted it to feel open and spacious,” Alexander said. Much of the work on the containers was completed off-site by SG Blocks, and then delivered for construction. It's clad in Cor-Ten weathering seel.

Other than some use of drywall, the structure is completely made of shipping containers.