Hsü Rudolphy   Chile   This residential building made of shipping containers, meant for young users, is a 1,400-square-meter, 4-floor construction raised with 6 prefabricated blocks of stairs and 70 recycled containers, which dynamically alternate to form little balconies.

Fenwick Iribarren Architects   Qatar   Since their invention and standardization in the mid-20th century, metallic containers have optimized shipping transportation, ushering in a new era of global logistics and commercial exchange. Later on, new approaches to architectural seriation and

EEESTUDIO Lys Villalba   Spain   Eva, carlos, two Belgian Malinois – Bicho and Bomba –, Harris the owl, five swift families, six kestrel families, and twenty sparrows, are all companion species. They live and learn together in this building, 30 kilometers west of Madrid. Sitting in

LOT-EK   South Africa   Part of a large-scale urban transformation project, this intervention is a response to the post-apartheid generation’s desire to introduce and adopt new models for living. Rising on a triangular plot of land, the building is formed by 140 shipping co

straddle3 Yaiza Terré Eulia Arkitektura   Spain   The aprop program for provisional housing launched by the City of Barcelona is designed to offer a swift, efficient, and pragmatic response to emergency situations caused by shortage of housing, keeping neighbors from having to leave gentrified distr

Ruizesquiroz Arquitectos   Spain   Ever since the first cargo ship carrying intermodal containers docked in Bremen in 1966, their growth and development in international trade has been spectacular. Shipping containers are icons of our globalized society. Almost everything we buy trave

Playze Architects   China   The visitor center of the ecological farm is formed by stacking containers, whose surfaces are perforated in accordance with geometric patterns and which are connected to one another by bridges of iron structure.

Shigeru Ban   United States   Made of shipping containers and paper tubes, the Nomadic Museum takes the concept of itinerant exhibition to the limit, because not only the works are moved from place to place, but also the building. In the year 2000, the Canadian photographer Grego

MVRDV   Netherlands   Subtracted temporarily from the world wide flow of trade, 3,500 containers are gathered in Rotterdam to form a megacontainer on the scale of the city: the City Container. These containers are used as the envelope – floor, walls, and ceiling – of an i

MVRDV   Netherlands   So as not to interrupt working activity during the renovation and extension of the Cancer Center Amsterdam, the studio planned the construction of a temporary building made from prefabricated containers on the northern edge of the same block, within

GRAFT Brandlab   Germany   With their capacity to bear a weight of 26,000 kilograms, the containers are piled on top of one another to form a volume that is perforated to form double spaces or controlled openings to the exterior.

Arcgency   Denmark   The building reuses transport containers to give them a new life as basic elements of a project where almost all the materials are recycled, making it possible to reduce costs and the ecological footprint.

Studio Arte   Portugal   A reused container serves as sustainable model for nomad housing: windows are cut out of the surface and a porticoed porch is added to the original volume to build a dwelling space that is reduced but has a great programmatic flexibility. 

Hombre de Piedra Buró 4 Arquitectos   Spain   Completely constructed with shipping containers transformed beforehand in the factory, the new cruise terminal of the city of Seville was set up in less than fifteen days.

Tamassociati   Sudan   En este singular edificio se han reutilizado parte de los centenares de contenedores de transporte enviados desde Europa para la construcción de un cercano hospital.

Yasutaka Yoshimura   Japan   The idea of peeping through the holes of a wall became a game and advertising gimmick in the recycled shipping container that was a mail-order furniture magazine’s stand at the Tokyo Designers Week fair.

Cannatà e Fernandes   Concebidos para albergar distintos usos temporales tales como un observatorio ambiental, un puesto de vigilancia forestal, un bar o un quiosco, estos contenedores de 27 metros cuadrados prefabricados en taller, autónomos por la integración de sus ins

Morger & Degelo   Switzerland   Within the initiative undertaken to provide its merely functional buildings with a distinctive profile, the Swiss railway company called a competition for the design of a prototype that should house the electric transformers and signaling machinery,

Andrés Perea   Spain   The solution adopted for this health center addresses the desire to simplify routes and optimize the use of space. Two criteria governed the functional layout of the program: the best orientation, and the degree of accessibility deemed adequate to ea

One of the main obsessions of modernity was the idea of aligning architecture with the factory. Standardization, serialization, modularization, prefabrication, and the recourse to pieces prepared in the workshop were some of the strategies applied in

For the headquarters of the sports equipment and accessories manufacturer Amaya Sport in Noain (Navarre), the architect Josean Ruiz Esquiroz – who works from offices in Madrid and Gorraiz – reused ten shipping containers as structural pieces while st

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The container has changed the world, and perhaps also the way we think. Goods are moved around the planet in metal boxes of standard size, and the radical drop in transport costs has transformed economic geography, enhancing trade and furthering glob

Juan Manuel Rojas   A casual stacking of containers makes many architects think of buildings. It’s like the game of spotting figures in the shapes of clouds. This leads not only to erecting buildings with containers, but to seeing container buildings as a source of solu

En la avenida de la Peseta, eje del nuevo ensanche del barrio madrileño de Carabanchel se alza un bloque semejante a un apilamiento de contenedores metálicos de colores brillantes. Se trata de las 82 viviendas de protección pública construidas por el

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Monopoly is a  a construction game, but a real estate game. The winner is whoever man- ages to put houses and hotels in the city’s best areas, bankrupting the other players with his greedy tolls. The colorful wooden prisms, cylinders, pyramids and ar

Fifteen years after completing Reliance Controls, Norman Foster returned to Swindon with another industrial commission, but this time executed in a bold expressionist language which offers a strong contrast with the confident restraint of the earlier

Between the completion of the Sainsbury Centre and the start of the Hong Kong project, Foster benefited from the relaxation of commitments to undertake a personal project, a house for himself in Hampstead. The design, of which full size mockups were

To many, the Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts is the ultimate well-serviced box, and the climax of all the experiments undertaken by Foster in the previous ten years, from Reliance and Olsen to IBM and SAPA; to others, this monumental framed cont

The coordination of structure and services in containers of rigorous modularity and immaculate detailing had been the main constructional challenge of the Foster team during the sixties, and this interest in the flexible fast-track shed was extended

This silent galss box houses 750 employees in 10,800 m2; but the huge container dissolves into the Hampshire landscape, its bronze-tinted facade reflecting the surrounding trees without interference from the minimalist detailing of the neoprene joint

If the family was changing, so was the workplace. And this electronics factory, designed and built in ten months of 1965 and 1966, gave Team 4 the opportunity to develop a system which was both a model of industrial construction and a paradigm of ind

Alexander Klose   How a Box Changes the Way We Think

Marc Levinson   How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger