Container Trip Observations

1. The rusted roof of a container lets in natural light.  It was a nice effect.  Perhaps the easiest way to create custom daylighting is to alter the roof, as it is not structural.

2. The holes for the air ventilation were smaller than I had expected.  For our purposes, perhaps we could punch holes like this over large areas of the walls and or ceilings, bringing in air and light, but also keeping a separation.

3. This reefer unit had aluminum floor decking that made me imagine using it as some sort of trellis or veranda

4. Many of us appreciated the stainless steel interior.  While I could imagine the wall in some sort of contemporary interior design application, I also noticed the drastic temperature reduction of the insulated unit.  For Florida, this aspect could be desirable.

5. This rather majestically positioned piece of rusting floor (?) gives a demonstration of repurposing pieces of the container.  Deconstructing the container to not think of it as a structural unit, but as a kit of building blocks could result in a wholly different type of container project.

6. These forklifts were pretty amazing to watch; the speed at which they could attach and carry off the containers was impressive.  Idea from this machine: could the whole container lift on site, or perhaps a platform would lift and attach to the elevated container. I can envision a pneumatic system to raise the container that would extend the space below, perhaps revealing a sort of pop-out system of levels or "floors" as it is raised.

7. The underside of the container shows just how reenforced the floor is.  It also reveals quite a lot of space between the beams, which could be used for electric/plumbing.  Depending on the project, one could remove the floor laying on the beams, and replace it with something like metal grating, which would remove some of the barrier between exterior/interior.

8. In the process of creating a security personnel hut/station, they began framing out studs for interior walls.  I thought it was interesting that they pre-fabricated the wall systems and slid them in without connecting them to the metal walls of the container.  The fabricators said they would slide in both long walls, then the final short side, which would wedge between the long sides, and keep it in place.

9. This is a picture of cross bracing in the large hanger type building which housed the sand blaster.  If we decide to cut away a lot of container wall, we may want to consider cross bracing as a way to make up for some of the lost lateral soundness.

10. The way the containers were stored, I kept envisioning a new type of town with walkable wide boulevards, side streets, and alleyways.  In this picture, the shipping containers make up the customizable prefabricated urban core.  Something we could think about in our project is despite only having one or two containers to design, perhaps they are just examples of a much larger system, designed to all work in concert.

11. I was struck by the intensity of the 'light at the end of the tunnel.'  The effect really drew my eyes in, and made the natural light specific instead of general.  I think we need to control natural light similarly in the project, not just chopping out large pieces of walls, but hiding and revealing when needed to create individual spaces with different characters in the container.

12. The massive loads these containers are build for far exceed those usually required for human use transformation.  Perhaps a design that actually uses all of a container's innate strength in a hybridization with some sort of built construction would make more of the containers sitting in fields more useable.