Collection by Hector Lopez
Shipping Container
The 800-square-foot house is among the first shipping container residences in San Diego County, according to Mike. He hopes it will soon by joined by a larger container home on the property, at which point it will become the guesthouse.
In the open-plan kitchen, a garage door can be retracted to take advantage of the balmy California climate and bring the outdoors in. Mike's wife, Shawn, appreciates the home's proximity to hiking trails.
Covered with wire mesh, the green roof will continue to vegetate over time.
A cherry red game room gives way to a second green space on the roof, which can be used as an extension of the indoor space.
The 1,668-square-foot three-bedroom home is made of four colorful, crisscrossed containers equipped with a simple ventilation system that facilitates a constant breeze.
The BetaBox mobile prototyping lab is outfitted with a 3D printer, a CNC mill, a laser cutter, and other tools for innovating.
This three-bedroom home in Lille, France, is made up of eight stacked containers.
Shipping containers are the building blocks of this residence tucked away in the redwood forests of Santa Cruz, California.
Shipping Container Home (Brisbane, Australia)
Architect and designer Todd Miller didn’t just use a shipping container for this home—it appears like he used an entire shipping company, since it took 31 containers to build this industrial but inviting home, which features a massive graffiti mural on the back wall.
Photo by ZieglerBuild
Maziar Behrooz designed this container studio set amid lush trees.
For an adaptive reuse project in Toronto, Levitt Goodman Architects used a shipping container as a visitors' center.
Tsai Design Studio turned a shipping container into a classroom located just outside of Cape Town, South Africa.
This modular home prototype by Meka is a shipping container clad in cedar.
Mike McConkey, a superintendent for a general contractor, tasked Chris Bittner of OBR Architecture with designing an environmentally sensitive home for he and his wife in San Diego County. Utilizing three shipping containers and a bevy of cost-effective appliances, they managed to limit the budget to $160,000.
Transforming shipping containers into habitable spaces is a growingly popular subset of prefab. Just off the Delaware River in Pennsylvania, Martha Moseley and Bill Mathesius adapted an unused concrete foundation to create a home made from 11 stacked shipping containers. "We were inspired by the site, and our desire to have something cool and different," says Moseley.
Two San Francisco art and travel addicts overhauled a loft—and customized a pair of shipping containers—to accommodate their collection and reflect their passions. The shipping containers were stacked, joined with steel tubes, and lashed to reinforced floor joints to make them earthquake-safe.
In February of 2007, two San Francisco art and travel addicts purchased a 3,200-square-foot former Chinese laundry and tooth-powder factory with column-free interiors and a zigzagging sawtooth roof in lower Pacific Heights. They customized a pair of shipping containers to accommodate their collection and reflect their passions, and hired a local company to sandblast the interior to expose the board-formed concrete walls and replace the carpeted floors with Georgia hickory pecan planks to further lengthen the loft and make it look more like a warehouse.