Living & Style DESIGN
Reclaimed metal boxes look cool, maybe that’s all they have to do Contain This
BY BEAU LYNOTT
A
few years ago, in the Before Times, I stayed at a boutique hotel with guest rooms made from shipping containers. The photos online looked cool: Rustic, minimalist, industrial chic. A kind of Restoration
on city-owned land in East Village. Originally conceived by NewSchool architecture students for a master’s thesis, the project revitalized a blighted vacant lot. The open-air space feels like an extension of the streetscape, with strings of lights illuminating an arty gathering area. Painted containers ring the perimeter, housing food, coffee, and beer vendors, with two-high stacks of containers backing a stage in one corner. Local architecture firm RAD LAB, whose founders designed and created Quartyard, has continued using freight containers in its projects. I asked the firm’s co-founder and CEO Philip Auchettl about the appeal of shipping containers from a design perspective. “I think people enjoy them on multiple levels,” the Australian-born Auchettl says. “The basic level is that it is a reclaimed material. There is an abundant amount of these containers in the United States. Secondly there’s the cool factor, and people just like shipping containers from an aesthetic standpoint. We do a number of different commercial projects, but also single-family homes, hotels, or an Airbnb, where people want to take Instagram photos. It's the novelty of staying in a shipping container versus a stucco box. It’s not boring.” RAD LAB also designed a shipping-container accessory dwelling unit (ADU) for Angela and Cris Noble, who operate the unit as a home office and short-term rental in the backyard of their Talmadge home.
Hardware meets The Boxcar Children vibe. They looked cool up close, too, though the weekend I spent in the oblong metal box was a mixed result. The free-standing casitas were hip and unique but clumsy and permeable to outside noise. The housing shortage and affordability crisis have increased pressure on state and local governments to embrace alternative approaches to getting people into homes. Shipping containers as a building material have been having a moment for some time, as a trendy innovation if not necessarily a broad movement. Reusing materials like excess cargo containers is an ecologically-conscious and economically viable strategy. There are millions of unused shipping containers around the world taking up space. One reason for this is that it’s expensive to ship empty containers back to their country of origin. In most cases, it’s cheaper for freight operators to buy new containers. The result is a massive surplus of rectangular metal boxes that could become a home, office, hotel, retail space, or almost anything else. The most prominent local example using freight containers as a construction medium is Quartyard, an event venue and urban park constructed from repurposed shipping containers
38 DECEMBER 2022
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