Almost 500,000 buildings have arrived at the Port of Los Angeles in 2021. Well- not exactly. Over 490,000 shipping containers have arrived, though. If there’s a design trend that has caught the world by storm over the past decade, it’s been the rise in transforming shipping containers into buildings as a form of architecture. But are shipping container buildings just a fad that was used to propel ideas about taking every day or is there more substance to creating giant Jenga-inspired structures?
It’s important to note that shipping container architecture is hardly a new concept. Fascination with them and their potential date back to the late 1960s, when Reyner Banham wrote an essay about container ports and their representation of the technological advancements of cities. Banham introduced the idea of shipping containers being similar to a “plug-and-play” type of architecture, praised for their industrial-inspired metabolist and simplistic nature. Years later, the first-ever built shipping container home was designed in 1987 by Phillip Clark, who even patented his personal process of turning these raw, steel boxes into occupiable spaces. Gaining more popularity with each passing year, shipping containers have become synonymous with architecture, heavily relying on the much-desired raw grunginess and the illusion of a cost-effective design solution to perpetuate their appeal en masse.
