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renovating the property. The house was clearly a tear-
down, so I suggested replacing it with a sea container
structure.” Remarkably, in less than eight months,
plans were drawn, permits issued, construction
completed, and the four-unit complex housing 24
students was fully occupied. “Amazing,” said the
architect, “building in the city never happens that fast.”
“This is exquisite technology,” he said of a typical
COR-TEN steel shipping container. “It constitutes a
great new building block of 21st-century architecture
and represents a new culture of modernism.” In
addition to its durability and relative affordability
when compared to conventional building construction,
the architect points to the value of repurposing
significant quantities of steel to meet housing needs.
And there are a lot of shipping containers. Price
cites container stats with ease: There are about 33
million containers crossing the high seas at any given
moment; an additional 2.3 million are sitting fallow in
ports worldwide, and of those, 750,000 are in the U.S.
Nearly all of the containers come from China and, as a
result of unbalanced trade patterns, far more containers
come into the U.S. than go out – it simply doesn’t make
financial sense to ship empty containers back to Asia.
Most of the containers used for residential building
measure 40 feet long, 8 feet wide, and 9 feet 6 inches
tall. The price of a container reflects its condition: A
heavily used container that has made multiple ocean
crossings with the resulting nicks, dings, and possible
contamination can cost as little as $1,200, while a
pristine “one-trip” box can cost up to $5,000.
Building on the success of his student housing project
in Brookland, Price continued testing the limits of
shipping container possibilities to include high-design,

Side view of the house, showing the sea containers
All photos © Dan Westergren with added windows and bays.

THE HUMBLE SHIPPING CONTAINER 59