If you think about it, we live in boxes. So maybe it doesn’t sound so farfetched to live in a cargo shipping container.
Sunni Wissmer has one for you. She calls it The Light Box. The 40-foot-long container with two walls of windows, solar panels and mirrored interior stands on end to give you four stories of functional elbowroom.
At 7-feet-by-8-feet-wide, each floor gives you just enough space for your elbows and the functionality necessary for one or two people.
The ground floor: kitchen. Second floor: living room. Third floor: bathroom and utility room. Top floor, accessible by a pull-down attic ladder: bedroom.
“I was thinking it would be good for high-end college dorms,” said Wissmer, a 16-year-old sophomore at Tacoma’s School of the Arts.
So far Wissmer’s architectural creation – and the container-as-living-space concepts of her SOTA classmates – remain drawing board sketches.
But who knows.
Southern California architect Peter DeMaria designed the first official two-story shipping container home in the U.S. in 2006, according to weburbanist.com. Since then, around the world, architects and developers have come up with increasingly creative ways to stack and connect containers to form offices, homes, shopping malls, live-work spaces, schools, apartments and hotels.
So when interior design instructor Seong Shin shopped for a spring semester project for her SOTA students, she settled on shipping containers.
“I challenged them to think outside the box,” said Shin, interior designer for Tacoma’s McGranahan Architects.
“We live in a port city with all these surplus containers just sitting here. These are creative kids with creative ideas,” she said. “It would be good to get a demo model if someone would take it on and build it.”
Maybe someone will. Shin has arranged for her students to formally present their concepts, in drawings and models, to a panel of Tacoma-area developers, artists, architects, real estate brokers, engineers and business leaders.
What they will see might surprise you.
Elisa Dawson, 17, saw Shin’s assignment as a chance to marry creative design with a desire to help people. So she designed Project Hope, which she describes as “a mobile healing space,” a medical day clinic for use in Third World countries.
Nicole Freeman wants a career in interior design, so the 16-year-old approached her container project as if a client hired her to design retail space for a clothier targeting young women.
During a field trip to the Port of Tacoma, Freeman and her classmates walked into a 20-foot-long container.
“Before we went, I had a lot of ideas. But it was smaller than I thought it was going to be,” she said. “For my boutique, if I keep it simple, a storage container would be about the right size.”
Senior Christine Parks put together two containers to form one modular luxury apartment. Rea Lankford, 17, designed a 62-foot-long container stood on end for a multistory home. Shannon Lopez, 18, had a vision of an austere hostel made from a long container stood on end and set in a Nebraska farm field called Half Glass Lofts.
While on vacation, would you book a room in a hotel called “The Green House,” which attaches a glassed-in, plant-filled greenhouse bathroom to a bedroom made from a shipping container? Rebecca Mantlya, 17, thinks so.
If we have learned anything in the currently stagnant development market, unique still sells. Think Hotel Murano with its focus on blown glass art. So now we need someone like Gordon Sondlund, Murano’s owner, to build The Green House.
Or, as instructor Shin says, “The City of Tacoma wants to make the brewery district into a art center for the creative class. That would the perfect place for someone to build one of these as a demonstration project.”
Dan Voelpel: 253-597-8785
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