Apparently New York can only take the imposition of overscaled art work when it’s too cold out to properly appreciate it (though considering the two million plus at Central Park, a fall installation may well have broken even the elastic potential of our collective backyard). Just six days after The Gates close (and even as they are coming down), the Nomadic Museum on Pier 54 will open.
Brought to us by the BiAnimale Foundation, an environmental nonprofit based in Switzerland, it is a temporary exhibition space designed by Shigeru Ban (a member of the THINK collective, and one of the architects of the Houses at Sagaponack project), which will display a work by Gregory Colbert through June 6.
The notable, and obvious, element is the use of entirely recycled materials, including paper tubes for structure and shipping containers for side walls. Just as the past two weeks has been a veritable festival of saffron, née orange, it looks like shipping containers are ready for their close-up.
This is not a new idea, at least to the GSD cocktail party set. Holt, Hinshaw, Pfau & Jones published a concept for a house made from shipping containers back in the eighties, and LOT-EK seems to have made an entire industry out of suggesting that other people live in containers and foam tents. Wes Jones is still beating that horse, with a site devoted to the benefits of container construction, though it looks more like a manifesto than a catalog, with no constructed examples.
The recent interest in shipping containers is a useful lesson for architecture students, for it recalls an older generation who had become a little too enamored of the aesthetics of modernism that quickly became detached from both the social and ideological realities that were much of its inspiration. Now, it should be evident from my irregular writings that I have no problem with the much of the ideology (and also recognize that there are still instances of the dream being real, hence the work from firms such as MVRDV), but find the facile appropriation frustrating. So now we get our own disgusting historical moment wherein the material of the ‘masses’ becomes appropriated and celebrated, but also made sufferable with the addition of $3,000 range tops.
Don’t get me wrong: there is a palpable housing crisis in most of the world, and modular construction has great potential to address this. Jones is also a participant in Modern Modular, a collective that is selling prefab housing solutions. And there was, and is, the highly publicized inaugural Dwell Home competition, won by locals Res 4, who did a tremendous amount of research and work developing a prefab solution — one they admitted was not necessarily as affordable as the competition set out to establish, even as they tried like hell to make it so. They are pretty pragmatic about the potential. Most of the typologies they present would be no more economical than stick-built construction, but prefab is about scale, and the scale must be cultivated. And you do that by making the nice stuff and hoping that it gets disseminated widely when manufacturing costs drop (see: IKEA).
Containers have scale, so the argument for inexpensive startup is ostensibly strong, but after that, it’s pretty much a shitty idea. The numbers are staggering (in terms of available material), with hundreds of thousands of empty containers piled up in ports such as Newark-Port Elizabeth, which see far more importing than exporting. But that makes their use only viable within a narrow radius of initial location. So it would cost as much, if not more, to ship a container to Sudan as it would back to China. Some ideas, such as Fox & Fowle’s proposal to build student housing in Gloucester, Massachusetts — a port city — verge on the viable. Add to that the high costs of labor in urban locations, and the numbers begin to make sense.
But anywhere else, they fall apart pretty quickly. Jones estimates it costs $20,000 — including his fees! — to convert a container into a house segment, but excludes fancy windows and finishes (which figure prominently in his renderings), and any site acquisition, prep, engineering or permitting, etc. Excepting that, his estimate is a rosy $62.50/sf, which is competitive with stick-built wood frame, but not a substantial improvement.
And now for the fun part, which no one likes to mention in detail: containers are only eight feet wide. There is no way around this. Add insulation and services down both sides, and you have seven feet of livable space. To improve upon this means lots of labor: cutting, custom attachment for reassembly, etc. In short, traditional construction with non-traditional materials, which means costs will spike, since most framers have never faced steel corrugated steel wall systems.
Now, you can see why it’s so popular with the architecture cognoscenti living in Manhattan shoeboxes, but seven feet is appropriate for just about no one else. Sure, students and the downtrodden will deal with it, but there is no reason to when there are cost-competitive alternatives that provide a decent footprint. There are other viable uses, but the prevailing aesthetic is nothing that would serve to uplift or edify. And if you want to play the affordable housing card, spend a semester at the Rural Studio, then get back to me if you still think containers are the end-all and be-all of adaptive reuse or recycling.
None of this really has anything to do with Ban’s design, where the scale of the containers isn’t relevant, but rather, they are used like traditional materials, albeit writ large. Stacked in running bond style and interspersed with fabric panels that run diagonally to mimic the roof slope, it is an impressive, colorful and enticing image. Since the final form may be more enclosed, and I don’t know the hours of operation, seeing it this week might be advisable, since lights are used at the end of the workday, and the interior illumination is striking, especially in late evening. If this will be a constant throughout the exhibit, perhaps waiting for a warm April evening would be advisable. But if you are a suspicious or worrisome sort (and I’m all that), go by now, while it’s a definite feature.
And, whatever you do, don’t be sucker for the impending Wallpaper* fetishization of shipping containers as homes. It’s a stupid idea in most executions. Prefab is a viable and compelling alternative. It’s inevitable that the 2050 version of John Pawson will make the 2050 version of a Calvin Klein boutique out of them, but hopefully it won’t come at the expense of a generation living in thousands of government housing program homes made from containers. But who am I kidding? It’s not like the government even builds housing any more.
This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.
I can hardly contain myself.
Apparently New York can only take the imposition of overscaled art work when it’s too cold out to properly appreciate it (though considering the two million plus at Central Park, a fall installation may well have broken even the elastic potential of our collective backyard). Just six days after The Gates close (and even as they are coming down), the Nomadic Museum on Pier 54 will open.
Brought to us by the BiAnimale Foundation, an environmental nonprofit based in Switzerland, it is a temporary exhibition space designed by Shigeru Ban (a member of the THINK collective, and one of the architects of the Houses at Sagaponack project), which will display a work by Gregory Colbert through June 6. The notable, and obvious, element is the use of entirely recycled materials, including paper tubes for structure and shipping containers for side walls. Just as the past two weeks has been a veritable festival of saffron, née orange, it looks like shipping containers are ready for their close-up. This is not a new idea, at least to the GSD cocktail party set. Holt, Hinshaw, Pfau & Jones published a concept for a house made from shipping containers back in the eighties, and LOT-EK seems to have made an entire industry out of suggesting that other people live in containers and foam tents. Wes Jones is still beating that horse, with a site devoted to the benefits of container construction, though it looks more like a manifesto than a catalog, with no constructed examples. The recent interest in shipping containers is a useful lesson for architecture students, for it recalls an older generation who had become a little too enamored of the aesthetics of modernism that quickly became detached from both the social and ideological realities that were much of its inspiration. Now, it should be evident from my irregular writings that I have no problem with the much of the ideology (and also recognize that there are still instances of the dream being real, hence the work from firms such as MVRDV), but find the facile appropriation frustrating. So now we get our own disgusting historical moment wherein the material of the ‘masses’ becomes appropriated and celebrated, but also made sufferable with the addition of $3,000 range tops. Don’t get me wrong: there is a palpable housing crisis in most of the world, and modular construction has great potential to address this. Jones is also a participant in Modern Modular, a collective that is selling prefab housing solutions. And there was, and is, the highly publicized inaugural Dwell Home competition, won by locals Res 4, who did a tremendous amount of research and work developing a prefab solution — one they admitted was not necessarily as affordable as the competition set out to establish, even as they tried like hell to make it so. They are pretty pragmatic about the potential. Most of the typologies they present would be no more economical than stick-built construction, but prefab is about scale, and the scale must be cultivated. And you do that by making the nice stuff and hoping that it gets disseminated widely when manufacturing costs drop (see: IKEA). Containers have scale, so the argument for inexpensive startup is ostensibly strong, but after that, it’s pretty much a shitty idea. The numbers are staggering (in terms of available material), with hundreds of thousands of empty containers piled up in ports such as Newark-Port Elizabeth, which see far more importing than exporting. But that makes their use only viable within a narrow radius of initial location. So it would cost as much, if not more, to ship a container to Sudan as it would back to China. Some ideas, such as Fox & Fowle’s proposal to build student housing in Gloucester, Massachusetts — a port city — verge on the viable. Add to that the high costs of labor in urban locations, and the numbers begin to make sense. But anywhere else, they fall apart pretty quickly. Jones estimates it costs $20,000 — including his fees! — to convert a container into a house segment, but excludes fancy windows and finishes (which figure prominently in his renderings), and any site acquisition, prep, engineering or permitting, etc. Excepting that, his estimate is a rosy $62.50/sf, which is competitive with stick-built wood frame, but not a substantial improvement. And now for the fun part, which no one likes to mention in detail: containers are only eight feet wide. There is no way around this. Add insulation and services down both sides, and you have seven feet of livable space. To improve upon this means lots of labor: cutting, custom attachment for reassembly, etc. In short, traditional construction with non-traditional materials, which means costs will spike, since most framers have never faced steel corrugated steel wall systems. Now, you can see why it’s so popular with the architecture cognoscenti living in Manhattan shoeboxes, but seven feet is appropriate for just about no one else. Sure, students and the downtrodden will deal with it, but there is no reason to when there are cost-competitive alternatives that provide a decent footprint. There are other viable uses, but the prevailing aesthetic is nothing that would serve to uplift or edify. And if you want to play the affordable housing card, spend a semester at the Rural Studio, then get back to me if you still think containers are the end-all and be-all of adaptive reuse or recycling. None of this really has anything to do with Ban’s design, where the scale of the containers isn’t relevant, but rather, they are used like traditional materials, albeit writ large. Stacked in running bond style and interspersed with fabric panels that run diagonally to mimic the roof slope, it is an impressive, colorful and enticing image. Since the final form may be more enclosed, and I don’t know the hours of operation, seeing it this week might be advisable, since lights are used at the end of the workday, and the interior illumination is striking, especially in late evening. If this will be a constant throughout the exhibit, perhaps waiting for a warm April evening would be advisable. But if you are a suspicious or worrisome sort (and I’m all that), go by now, while it’s a definite feature. And, whatever you do, don’t be sucker for the impending Wallpaper* fetishization of shipping containers as homes. It’s a stupid idea in most executions. Prefab is a viable and compelling alternative. It’s inevitable that the 2050 version of John Pawson will make the 2050 version of a Calvin Klein boutique out of them, but hopefully it won’t come at the expense of a generation living in thousands of government housing program homes made from containers. But who am I kidding? It’s not like the government even builds housing any more.