Thinking inside the box

A friend of mine told me a few years ago how he plans to build a low-cost retirement house consisting of 5 shipping containers configured around a central courtyard with one of those Mexican outdoor fireplaces in the middle of it on a rural property somewhere in northern New South Wales. I was not entirely convinced, mainly because of the narrowness of the containers as anything else, but then he is a very capable person and very good at envisaging building projects and then making them happen, so quite probably he is onto something.

Certainly there does seem to be a logical sort of appeal to reusing some of the thousands of shipping containers lying about in retirement around the world. The Dutch seem to like the idea, having set the first ever series of Big Brother inside a shipping container and then constructed student housing in Amsterdam from recycled containers (you can read about it here and here).

Student housing is one thing, but would you want to live in a shipping container on a more permanent basis? How do you get cross-ventilation? What about the economics of heating or cooling? The Domain supplement in this week's Sunday Age had two articles about container housing. The first was about a new container called "Small is Smart" designed by Australian firm Fulton Salomon. They propose it be used for holiday homes, granny flats, student accommodation and retirement villages as well as social, worker and emergency housing. It includes an "edible" wall vegetable garden on the exterior, and I suppose you could also include some solar panels, a water tank and a grey water system to make it even more sustainable. It's small, with a Pullman style bed and only room for two chairs at the dining table and one small couch in the living area. Using the salvaged container reduces the carbon footprint of new construction and keeps costs very low. It certainly looks a bit more luxurious than the caravan and annex that my grandparents lived in for many years, but personally I think I'd need a little bit more space.

That bit more space is suggested in the "respod" designs of MG Architecture. I must say I quite like the 3 bedroom C-type design with the corrugated steel cladding. I think it looks great and functional too.

One of the immediate problems with container housing, mentioned in the second article in the Age, is that in Australia at least we are still a long way from accepting innovative approaches to housing solutions, probably because we just don't have the same level of housing shortages evident in more crowded urban areas of the world. In particular, using containers for social housing in Australia would almost certainly contribute to social stigma.

It's certainly an interesting idea though and one which we need to explore further if we want to become more sustainable in our residential building practices.