A Ruddy Shipping Container House Is Assembled in New York in Only Two Days
With a prefab structure near Hudson, LOT-EK—the pioneers of shipping container architecture—make a new case for the genre.
With a prefab structure near Hudson, LOT-EK—the pioneers of shipping container architecture—make a new case for the genre.
It was in the early 1990s that Giuseppe Lignano and Ada Tolla, lifelong friends and founding partners of the design firm LOT-EK, stumbled on a giant depot of shipping containers in (where else?) New Jersey.
"We immediately saw a huge potential in this object, from both an ecological and an artistic perspective," says Lignano of their realization that the ubiquitous vessels could be upcycled into architectural building blocks. "But we didn’t know anything about containers when we first started playing with them."
Turning a shipping container into a home is rarely as simple as it sounds, but design studio LOT-EK set out to prove that these vessels could become the raw material for an efficient prefab construction process with a house in upstate New York. Victoria Masters, Dave Sutton, and their daughter, Bowie, live in the six merged containers.
Photo: Pippa Drummond
For 27 years, the firm has been "playing" with extraordinary results: multiple national and international awards, exhibitions at the Whitney and MoMA, and a reputation within the architecture and design community as the progenitors of the shipping container typology.
In that time, a fad for shipping container architecture has experienced an arc of popularity, with designers slicing and dicing containers more for the novelty than out of an interest in creating a sustainable recycling process. And once you begin cutting into them and adding structure and insulation, shipping container conversions can be an ironically wasteful way to build a house.
In the open living/kitchen/dining area, the containers’ original apitong wood flooring, heavily sanded and sealed multiple times, complements the industrial austerity of the painted corrugated steel ceilings.
Photo: Pippa Drummond
Two mustard Crescent swivel chairs and throw pillows from West Elm add a touch of color to the living area. Under the chairs, a steel plate from the original shipping container reminds everyone what the house used to be. The fireplace is Fire Drum 2 by Malm and the firewood holder is by David DeSantis, while the rug is vintage.
Photo: Pippa Drummond
See the full story on Dwell.com: A Ruddy Shipping Container House Is Assembled in New York in Only Two Days
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