Container City

For this container “city”, fifteen shipping containers were used. All of them being 40-foot containers set up in groups of three to make five different dwellings, or in this case, affordable student housing. As you can see below in the blueprint of a single dwelling there are four bedrooms, four bathrooms, and a common area to connect everything together. A staircase is used as the entrance into the apartment which goes up the five stories to connect them all together. This also allows the buildings to be somewhat modular so they can connect and be arranged in different ways so that the layout of these buildings can configure to the area they’re built in.

One of these few things that inspired us to build it this way is how dorms are designed in colleges and universities. In a dorm, there’s a few different setups but the most common is a single room with one bathroom that two people share. Or there’s a suite where its two rooms and a common area that the suitemates share. This is set up in a suite fashion where up to six people can live there. Two people in the bigger bedrooms and one person per smaller bedroom. But to kind of get a sense of ownership in this living arrangement each bedroom has its own bathroom with a toilet, shower, and sink. Something that this setup has that most dorms do not have is the huge common area that connects the four bedrooms.

The common area in the middle is a full 40-foot shipping container with the doors to the bedrooms on opposite corners to maximize space in the area. At the opposite end of the main entrance sits the kitchen. The kitchen itself is a full kitchen with a dishwasher, sink, fridge, oven, and microwave. The rest of the space is used for a living area and possibly a washer and dryer, but that all depends on how the school wants to set it up. Looking closely at the blueprints and the picture on the right, you can tell that the door to each room is a sliding door. That is so it saves space and the doors that open don’t swing out and hit furniture or preventing people from putting some things in certain places. A good example of how it looks would be the picture above. That’s also an example of the smaller bedroom and its layout is from a three-dimensional view. Something else that is a great design choice about the bedrooms is how big the windows are, allowing for a lot of natural light to come in and that saves with not only electric bills, but can help warm and cool the rooms depending on how they’re used. One other way these dwellings would save some money is by using common materials. One thing that was used is concrete, not only for the stairs but also the flooring would be a glazed concrete. The exterior would stay the way it is, but interior walls would be insulated and use sheetrock to cover it up. The sliding doors would be made out of wood and so would the frames of the doors. The bathrooms would use tiling as flooring and partially in the walls. Steel would be used for railings up the stairs and supporting these buildings up and together.