Fast Company looks at designers using shipping containers as a medium.
Turn a corner nowadays, and you’ll find a building made out of shipping containers. So it was probably inevitable that architects would take this symbol of a “globalized, mobile, nomadic age,” to quote German curator Werner Lippert, to extreme places: to the frosty shores of Antarctica, to high-rise rooftops in Melbourne, to the seven seas as a “container ship hotel,” and to Hoorn, The Netherlands, where two shipping containers meet at a corner smack dab in the middle of a canal, forming a bridge that’s perched so precariously, it looks like it could collapse if you breathed on it.
These freight hacks — and many more, both quotidian and far-fetched — make up the expansive exhibit Container Architecture on view at NRW-Forum Düsseldorf in Germany through September 4. The show gathers images of more than 100 examples of reconditioned shipping containers, some real, some conceptual, and includes two dozen models constructed on a 1:5 scale (one of which actually breaks through the ceiling of the museum).
Photo credit: NRW-Forum Düsseldorf
