Containers ‘the best thing since the brick’ Brain waves over internet
Travis Price sat in a chair in the cafeteria of Miner Elementary in Northeast Washington with his arms folded across his chest and a look of intense concentration on his face.
The advisory neighbourhood commission was considering Price’s design for 22 townhouses made entirely of used shipping containers that would go on a vacant city-owned lot.
Price is a fervent, sometimes hyperbolic-sounding evangelist for container architecture. He calls shipping containers ‘‘the best thing since the brick’’, because the steel boxes offer a cheaper, faster, more sustainable way to build.
Price would deliver more units, including 10 affordable ones, for less money and in less time than the two other bids under consideration. One offered 12 conventionally built rowhouses and the other, 10.
But there had been ‘‘misgivings on the aesthetic design’’, Dan Golden, head of the ANC’s economic development subcommittee, told the April gathering of about 60 residents. Price knew what he really meant: Some of the neighbours thought the containers would stick out among the rowhouses, and not in a good way.
The 66-year-old architect with wavy gray hair and a mild Georgia accent raised his hand to speak. ‘‘To be subjective about one aesthetic over another is a little unnecessary,’’ he said.
It was an odd position for an architect, imploring an audience not to get hung up on a building’s looks. But the city had asked for more than a pleasing design; it required a certain amount of green materials and energy efficiency. Price wanted to shift attention to his design’s economic and ecological advantages.
‘‘This is such bulls...,’’ he vented in the hallway afterward.
The commission does not have the last say on the project; the city does. But still, the reaction was a setback for Price. He had designed the city’s first shipping-container apartment building on a privately owned site near Catholic University, which opened last September. Dubbed SeaUA, referring to both its structure and the university, the four-level stack of blue corrugated boxes fronted by floor-to-ceiling windows drew a crush of media attention and calls and emails to Price from developers across the country. The college students who moved into the four six-bedroom apartments quickly got tired of the gawking.
‘‘At first, it was kind of funny,’’ said Jamie Young, a senior who moved into the top floor with seven buddies from the football team. ‘‘After the 20th person asked to come to take a tour, we said, ‘It’s our house. It’s not a museum’.’’
Although some of his housemates who have doubled up in a bedroom found it a little cramped sometimes, he said, ‘‘they make the room-share work’’.
Young, who has his own room, said he has come to love the building. ‘‘I can definitely say I lived in quite a special place. It is going to be a great story to tell down the road.’’
SeaUA’s reception was the latest sign that shipping-container architecture had finally arrived in the US, a conclusion backed by Dwell magazine spreads, HGTV shows and umpteen Pinterest boards. It had already become trendy globally. In London, several temporary container buildings, including the BBC’s broadcasting studios, were erected for the 2012 Summer Olympics. In Amsterdam, containers have been used to build student housing. In August, Ganti and Associates won an international competition to design temporary housing in Mumbai with a skyscraper made of containers.
‘‘When you start hitting the mainstream, you know that something is coming,’’ Price said.
A few weeks after the meeting at Miner Elementary, Price holed up inside Catholic’s architecture building, where he has taught since 1991, to critique student designs for a proposed container industrial park in Swinford, Ireland. The students used the containers like giant Lego bricks, stacking them to form larger boxy shapes or scattering them at odd angles.
Containers offer builders cost savings, time savings and flexibility. After delivering the sandblasted, repainted and cut units, which cost US$1100 to US$3500 (NZ$1740-$5535) each, prepping the site, stacking them and filling out the interior, the final construction tally comes in around $160 per square foot, Price said, compared with $225 per square foot for a conventional structure. (The cost savings comes mainly from not having to spend as much money on a building’s exterior structure.) Because 40 to 50 per cent of the walls can be removed without harming the structural integrity, designers can add windows or combine containers to create larger interior spaces and aren’t limited to the containers’ dimensions of 2.4 metres wide by2.9m high by 12.2m long. And a building made out of used containers can be put up in half the time of a conventional one.
Price can rattle off those facts and figures, something his students are not as adept at yet. ‘‘You’re underselling it,’’ he tells one mumbler.
He wants his students to be skilled at pitching ideas in the real world of developers, zoning boards and skeptical neighbours. That comes easy to Price, who is a talker. e monochromatic, bland whisper.’’
Price was introduced to shipping containers in New Mexico during the 1970s when they were used in passive solar housing. Their moment passed with the energy crisis.According to Marc Levinson, an economist and author, standardising the size of the containers dramatically reduced the expense to ship goods from low-cost labour centers in Asia to markets in the West.
Today, thanks to the West’s huge trade deficit with China, it can be more cost-effective to send new containers full of goods than to pay for used ones to be sent back empty.
At any given time, experts estimate, 2.5 million containers are sitting empty around the world. That includes hundreds of thousands at American ports such as Baltimore, which handled about 126,000 empty containers in 2014. Finding uses for the containers has become irresistible to eco-minded architects and consumers.
Price moved to Takoma Park, Maryland, in 1980 and built a practice in preservation and designing modernist buildings with minimalist interiors and lots of glass. The popularity of industrial-style and sustainable design led to a resurgence of ‘‘cargo chic’’. By then global economic forces had created a chronic surplus of empty containers.
Price said architects today had made containers a ‘‘cooler and more affordable’’, modular way to build, ‘‘but next will be who can shape it most creatively and not in a gimmicky way’’. A question-and-answer game has been conducted by sending brain signals over the internet between two players more than a kilometre apart.
The United States study is thought to be the first to demonstrate a telepathic link based on nerve impulses, allowing one person to guess what is on another’s mind.
For the experiment, one participant (the respondent) wears an electrode cap recording brain activity while being shown an object on a computer screen, for instance a picture of a dog.
A second player (the inquirer) has a list of possible objects and associated questions, and sends a series of questions to the respondent by clicking a mouse.
The respondent replies ‘‘yes’’ or ‘‘no’’ to each question by focusing on one of two LED lights flashing at different frequencies.
Both answers send a signal over the internet that activates a neuron-stimulating coil behind the inquirer’s head.
However, only a ‘‘yes’’ signal is intense enough to trigger what appears to be a flash of light behind the eyes.
The flash, or ‘‘phosphene’’, caused by a brief disruption in the brain’s visual cortex, tells the inquirer the answer is ‘‘yes’’.
By noting the answers to the questions, the inquirer eventually identifies the object.
Lead scientist Dr Andrea Stocco, from the University of Washington, said it was the most complex brain-to-brain experiment that had been done in humans.
‘‘It uses conscious experiences through signals that are experienced visually, and it requires two people to collaborate.’’
The study was carried out in dark rooms in two university laboratories just more than a kilometre apart, and involved five pairs of volunteers, who played 20 rounds of the game.
Steps were taken to ensure participants did not cheat and had to complete the game using direct brain communication.
The inquirers wore earplugs so they could not hear the different sounds produced by the magnetic coil when transmitting a ‘‘yes’’ or ‘‘no’’ signal.
Players were able to guess the correct object 72 per cent of the time. Incorrect guesses were caused by several factors, including uncertainty about whether a phosphene had appeared.
The brain game is described in the online journal Public Library of Science ONE.