Container City: Keeping the Tower Crane On Site as the Building's Permanent Spine

Every tower in a growing city begins with a crane, and almost every crane leaves once the building is done. The machine that lifted each piece into place disappears, and with it goes the building's ability to change. Container City asks a sharp question: what if the crane stayed, and the building never stopped being built?

Container City is the work of Bersu Başaranoğlu, Merve OZUBEK and sümeyye şahin, entered in the Container City competition. The proposal pairs two reuse strategies: retired shipping containers become the rooms, and the crane becomes the structure that holds, serves and keeps rearranging them. The result is an addible and removable building that can respond to rising demand in the years ahead.

The Crane Mast Becomes the Building's Core

The key section makes the move legible at once. A vertical shaft, rendered in a single saturated blue, runs through every floor, and the container rooms hang off it on four numbered levels. The mast is not scaffolding to be removed later; it is the core of the plan. People work at desks, sit in lounges and meditate in rooms stacked around it, while the jib above stays ready to lift the next unit.

The axonometric at the top right sets out the logic in two states: a first form, and a future form of additional containers added according to user needs. Install and uninstall are drawn as equal operations. That symmetry matters, because it makes removal as normal a part of the building's life as growth, which few container schemes allow.

Floor Plans That Spiral Instead of Stack

The plan diagrams show the containers do not simply pile up in identical layers. On a square grid, each floor shifts its footprint, forming hooked, spiral-like rings around the central shaft. The board separates container top surfaces used as flooring from additional surfaces, so the roof of one unit becomes the terrace or corridor of the floor above. The section is porous rather than solid, with open decks and voids threaded between the boxes.

The process panels frame the reasoning: containers that have finished their shipping life become waste, and the board lists land shortage, high prices, low student income, large population and construction cost as the pressures behind the scheme. The unit drawings at the bottom break each container into its layers, a reminder that the module is meant to be handled, swapped and refitted, not sealed into place.

A Site Plan That Reads Like a Field of Cranes

The site plan is the most provocative drawing in the set. Instead of locating one building on one lot, it scatters several crane-and-container towers among a dense, pale forest of high-rises. The black container clusters cling to the cranes like nests on a mast, some low and wide, one lifted high above the skyline. The implication is clear: this is not a site-specific building but a system that can attach wherever a crane already stands.

That shifts the argument about land. If the crane carries the building, the scarce resource is no longer ground but the machine, and cities already erect cranes constantly. Container City treats the construction phase of the surrounding skyline as an opportunity rather than a temporary disruption.

Open Decks Where the Containers Pull Apart

The collage render brings the system down to the scale of a body. Through a bolted steel frame, corrugated container walls line a long open deck where people read, play guitar, stretch and talk, while billboards and a hazy skyline crowd the background. The frame does more than carry boxes; it creates the in-between floors where shared life happens, the spaces that a stack of sealed containers alone would never produce.

The neon-tinged imagery places the project in a near-future urban mood, a reading explored further in the uni.xyz journal CONTAINER CITY. Beneath the styling, though, the render makes a practical point: openness is built into the grid, so the building can densify by filling bays or loosen by removing them.

Why This Project Matters

Container architecture usually stops at the container, treating the shipping box as a ready-made room and nothing more. Container City looks one step further up the supply chain and asks what else the building process leaves behind. By keeping the crane under the control of the structure, the team turns the most temporary object on a construction site into the most permanent one, and makes adaptability a function of the building rather than a promise in its brochure.

The proposal deliberately leaves its future open-ended and unplanned, and that is its strongest claim. A building whose final form is never fixed demands a different kind of drawing, one that shows states and operations rather than a finished object, and these boards attempt exactly that. Whether or not cranes ever stay behind, the project reframes growth as something a building can do for itself.

View the Full Project

Project team

Designers: Bersu Başaranoğlu, Merve OZUBEK, sümeyye şahin

Competition and award

Entry in Container City

Related reading

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