Architecture-I'll take mine to go...

I’ve always been interested in pre-fabrication and mass production when it comes to buildings. And over the years there have been many different ways of applying these ideas to the buildings around us.

I also have an interest in using materials at hand, not to recycle them, but use them in their original forms. The idea of doing this interests me and with the forms created from such structures, I would hope, inspires other people to see more than just the face value of an object.

Now we’ve all seen shipping containers, those oversized Lego blocks floating around the world on ships, and it’s not a new idea to use them as a building.

But more recently people have started to look at these items more seriously as building components, I like this idea and think it’s a great one! I remember first playing with the idea back in 2001, and since then, many good examples of this architecture have been proposed and some even built.

One of the concepts I have played with is a modular design that can be literally stacked into a building like Lego blocks. Providing a few different pre-fabricated blocks, gives great flexibility to any designer. That coupled with the shipping containers inherent structural strength and stackable nature, means that building with these steel boxes is incredibly easy.

Here I have included the box modules that I designed for a university dormitory project in the south of Taiwan.

The basic box

A 2x box configuration for a 4x person dorm room

A 1x box single occupancy dorm room

One box of a 3x box configuration for a 4x person dorm room-Living

One box of a 3x box configuration for a 4x person dorm room-Bathroom

1of3 possible configurations for the 3x box 4x person dorm room

A 2x box elevator unit, that can be stacked to create the elevator shaft and landing on each floor of the building

A 1x box staircase unit

All of these components can be carried to the desired building site on a standard container truck, be hoisted into position and then secured in place. Low rise buildings are simple and quick to install on site, and with each unit being pre-fabricated off site, only utility connection have to be made to have the building operational and ready for use. A simple building using a system like this could conceivably be installed on site in a couple of days, drastically reducing the costs to the building contractor and land owner, as well as scoring some decent points from a sustainability standpoint.