Contain Yourself: 7 of the Best Shipping Crate Structures

Earlier this year, when the Downey Conservancy announced their efforts to #SaveTacoBell, we took the opportunity to look at how the beloved chain restaurant has reinvented itself over the years. SxSW sees the latest incarnation of their restaurant: Taco Bell is jumping on the shipping-container building trend.

Image via Fast Company

Shipping containers have long been a choice for trendy architecture. Not so much for their function — they’re actually somewhat difficult to build with — but for their shabby aesthetic, which screams post-industrial environmentalism. The modular building system doesn’t necessarily mimic the logic of stacking cargo containers in on a ship, but it can. Or, inversely, if designing a building in an industrial port city, you can use movable louvers to mimic the look of a stack of containers.

Here are some shipping container buildings that do Taco Bell one better:

Caterpillar House by Sebastián Irarrázaval, Santiago, Chile

Five disused containers make up this violently cantilevered house. The shipping container unit has been stripped away through material application that joins multiple part of the house, but the width and height can be read as clearly cargo.

Oceanscope by AnLstudio. Incheon City, Korea

The crates are chopped up in this beach viewing platform, and horizontal windows on diagonal boxes play visual tricks on your mind.

Amin Shipping Container Library by dpavilion architects, Batu, Indonesia

Recalling Will Alsop’s Sharp Center for Design in Toronto, this library deploys eight recycled containers supported by angled columns, in a colorful jumble of glass and container.

Barneveld Noord by NL Architects, Utrecht, Netherlands

A container is flipped on its side, creating a tower that would make Robert Venturi proud. This also subverts the context of the crate as a module of stacking, and thus a module of construction.