Alison Gregor’s article on re-purposed building materials works hard to see innovation where there is none to be found. Yes, sustainability and recycling are virtues in construction, but the shipping container projects of which the author is so enamored are nostalgic, kitsch architectures. They provide at best, the images of innovation and fiscal chastity without the substance.
Shipping containers, it turns out, are poor substitutes for other construction methods. Steel is a terrible insulator. Toxic chemicals abound in the painted walls and quarantine chemicals applied to the flooring (including arsenic and chromium). An entire generation of architectural students learned this lesson in the 1990′s when containers were briefly in vogue as a subject of design study.
The Real Estate Industry, embarrassed by its excesses of the last decade, has predictably gone shopping for the most expedient fig leaf. We should ignore it.
