How 16 containers became 8 market-rate Phoenix apartments

with Phoenix we don't have buildings that for once warehouses or manufacturing facilities that everyone is now turning into lofts we don't have the manufacturing facility where boats had been made here for a hundred years and now there are cool lofts so this shipping container allows us to bring a little bit of that richness that's really missing here in Phoenix so this this tells a little bit of the story of where these things have been they've been all over the world traveling and now they're here stuck in Phoenix and for someone to live in that is really kind of a good story [Music] because of our trade deficit in America we're sitting on thousands and thousands of shipping containers it's amazing the yards that you walk through just never ending up shipping containers and so it's expensive to break those down and send them back to China to recycle is really expensive and so this is a very small part of that but it's a process and one of those solutions it was a real challenge to make market rate apartments using containers you see a lot of renderings of apartment projects and not a lot of them get built I think it's hard to do something that is not done often and I think it makes sensors there is an efficiency but I think that efficiency a lot of that is because were the architect the general contractor and on the development team the container set took probably four hours we had never done it before so we've had a lot of backup plans going into it one of the biggest challenges that a lot of people I don't think about when you doing container project is there a big box that you have to move around and it takes a lot to do that whether it's a forklift or crane and so you have to really efficient about what you do when you do it and where you do it these got delivered from Long Beach it's not like you say hey Long Beach I want to come look at containers and they come out you say okay move that one over I want to look at that one move that one over they thought it was crazy right so I go out there and there's thousands of containers I say I want all blue ones I really you just have to hope for the best you can get a kind of grade of shipping container that's cargo worthy and we found a broker that was willing to work with us and get all blue ones and so they they get sent here and you get one one day and maybe if three the next day or next week you have to be able to unload them right so having a small site and having the infrastructure to do that really it's difficult so we had a yard these all went to we did some work on them before and then one day we thought I was going to take us two days to set them the first day we were done by two o'clock that day and so it was really great how quickly they went together and so the doors they alternate between downstairs and upstairs but the what the doors are kept just as they are we welded them in place they don't move so you couldn't close them all not on this project I mean I think in places where let's for example Charleston South Carolina where you have hurricanes come through I think it'd be really great to build something like this and to be able to close it up and then after the storm you just open it up because they're not going anywhere we kind of stayed true to how the container works they're connected together on top just the way they're connected on boats there's a cam lock that they set them down and then you turn the cam lock and so that's true to how the container where it's not not to fight it but let's use it as it is then you can see the base of these are on really just a spread footing they're off the ground and so the containers sit on four points that's how they're made to ship and so that's what we did is we rested them on four points so these things float off the ground and for us it's great only touch the landscape in a very small amount of points it's also great for water attention it doesn't allow we don't have to cover the entire ground with it some of the design process what we do and that's one of those things in the field is we had all these containers sitting in a yard and we said okay this side makes a lot of sense for here mark that a this side let's put that on the insides it has it big dent in it it's kind of a puzzle you have to figure out which container goes where people always say so what are you cladding it in or are you really leaving it that way and and for us it was I'm going to questions and there's practical reasons that we don't ever have to paint it but architectural II just exposing the container for what it is we chose the Navy because it looks great with rust and you just express it the shipping dinners are made from Corten steel so as it rusts it seals itself and they're made for really harsh environments crossing the ocean and salt water and storms and so they're really durable and you can see kind of the rust coming through it's different than typical steel that can rust through these won't rust through it you know the joking and the businesses we call that patina all right it starts to gain character it's not it's not it's not ugly rust its patina you know we were generally ok with all this type of scratches I mean these things have been shipped and carried and moved around and so there's a lot of damage that you you know we had some specifics about too large of dents towards the inside you can see this one right here has a dent towards the outside they've patched in a panel you can see that that's welded through there all of that was ok for us as long as your corner posts are not damaged structurally you're okay so that was important so we just created a specification that made sense for the containers that we wanted and then we had some other challenges here we're right on Grand Avenue which is a major arterial street that leaks downtown Phoenix to the interstate and the entire West Valley so one of the big challenges here is how do we address this street we actually base the containers inward towards a central courtyard we really wanted to create something that allowed the residents to feel safe so this doesn't feel like a container inside and you don't see anything right I don't am I missing something well we use the florist we've covered them in a totally encapsulated the floor in a through body epoxy and then every unit is two containers so here we're able to keep the exterior skin where the open where the doors use the existing opening in structure to glaze so I think you really get a sense that you're in the container you're looking out the main window each apartment is two 40-foot shipping containers they're high cubes the nine alfie we're able to get an 8-foot lid out of that still have room for all four utilities and separate again so right down the middle is the joint between the two containers so this is one eight foot container here's the other one we kept a really simple open modern floor plan so but actually no doors that separate the living space from the bedroom space and I think one of the strong design moves we made here going into this projects we never done sugar product before we wanna make sure we had a few unknowns as possible is we built a conventionally built masonry core the houses all mechanical plumbing and electrical the imagine this is the outside wall of the container you cut a hole in the container and this actually is in the conventionally built made cement core so all the plumbing all the water all the sewers all in that conventionally build core and the importance of that is actually not that it's less expensive but on this first project we're using subcontractors who are not familiar with working in shipping containers if we want to pay a premium based on unknown so our mechanical plumbing electrical guys and fire sprinkler guys very easily wrap their minds around basically built structure with wood framing and so the wet side of the kitchen all the water and sewer is on this side was actually in the conventionally both part of the structure and then the dry side and just the electrical side of the kitchen is on this side we have the laundry on this conventionally built side and we also have the the bathrooms on the conventional yes are you coming out of the container into the conventional core this happens to be the 88 unit as well so we've got 80 a shower and drop bars etc this is not the container anymore you add it on right okay yeah when you're outside you'll see between the sacks and containers is a masonry structure that's what we're standing in right now with houses all the wet plumbing because you didn't want to try to fit everything in the container because it's just easier building that way or what's it actually easier building that way now that we've done it but we went before we did it we didn't know that and the subcontractors actually going to be doing the work didn't know that so we didn't want to pay a premium on the unknown this is actually fairly large I mean this is a queen bed and you're able to have a lot of space yeah because we have two containers together we've come in roughly a foot on each side so you're left with approximately fourteen feet wide so this is a seven hundred and forty square feet it's a one-bedroom but it's a large one-bedroom we thought that it made a lot of sense for a shipping container to not necessarily cram as much as you can into it but have more of an open feel the floor is one of those really important things because the floors tell a story you can see what was scraped through and there's barrel rings and things like that you can see that the treads from where a tie are laid in here see right here these increments these were made so the forklifts drive in here Drive Allen so you can see then here where there's treads and we just sealed it all in see these these are steel plates that are on every container where if you have a dead or something they can pick them from the back of a tilt truck it caves in so that when it sits on a truck it fits the rigging yeah so this is inch 1/8 plywood and then this is steel so all the white pieces are steel here kind of talks about what was on the floor as we sealed it we don't have a lot of this in Phoenix and right so it brings a little bit of a richness I always get the comic I do a container thing that oh it's dangerous the chemicals in the floor don't you know can you address that yes we source containers are allowed to be shipped in Australia which has much more strict pesticide regulations that and we talk just to be safe we totally encapsulated the floor so it's multiple layers of a through body epoxy this is conventionally framed on the interior for in order for us to get our radiance knocked down and for a secured insulation value to meet residential codes that's probably the funniest question we get yeah people always ask how we cool it in the desert what are they hot for us it's we do a lot of houses actually out of steel cladding steel it's one of those things that doesn't store the heat all day long like masonry or mass does it releases it very quickly even though our walls are much higher r-value than what code requires we haven't had an issue these things are incredibly efficient and waterproof and waterproof do you see a time where shipping containers have an advantage over another type of building when economies of scale well I think I can make a lot of sense in cities where it costs a lot more to build in a dozen Phoenix right you're still paying the same amount for the shipping container whether you're in San Francisco or you're here obviously land cost a lot more but here if it costs us 150 dollars a foot to build versus 400 dollars a foot to build in let's say San Francisco the shipping container still costs the same amount so you're getting a closure and the structure for the same price no matter where you built and so that it makes a lot of sense there for sure there's a lot of things that impact the ability to scale shipping containers and in the United States we have really stringent codes and so they're made out of steel it's a combustible material and so we're limited by square footage and height I would love to be able to stack I and I think there's projects you can see in Amsterdam and Johannesburg South Africa where they've done that we're just aren't able to do that in America with our live safety codes so condos we can go for high apartments 3i and so if you clad or monokote with a fireproofing material on the outside then you definitely could do that and that that may be a really smart way if we can go eight to ten high create elevator cores and cover them all the structure supports it right they do it on boat stack of eight ten ion boats and they support 275 pounds per square foot which is more than five times what we designed for typically so there's very strong and I would love the opportunity to be able to do that but also one of the things that we're limited on is really financing banks aren't on board yet with financing a shipping container project even though it's much stronger than the stucco ship boxes that everyone else is building they don't know what it is you know we've had questions from really smart people that say hey kit this could be a HUD type product where it's a trailer and somebody could put it on their truck and take it with them and it's nowhere near that right it's welded to the ground and it's attached to each other it's a building built with the International Building Code and so for us it's no different than any other building module or block and so the financing is really difficult so all the projects that we've done have been 100 percent cash or 100 percent equity and that's that's been the only way that we're able to get them done because there's no debt out there for shipping container projects we're hoping to change that a little bit one of the things we want to do is town homes that requires to really get a comp right appraisers come out I don't know how to appraise a shipping container so there's challenges that we're hoping to start kind of baby stepping to the point where there's a learning curve and hopefully the banks can get on board just like the city has you

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 991,261

Rating: 4.8507733 out of 5

Keywords: containertecture, shipping containers, cargo container, shipping container building, cargo container building, container homes, shipping container homes, cargo container homes, recycled construction, prefab, modular construction, modular architecture, small space, metalwork, reused materials, reclaimed materials, recycled materials, starkjames, phoenix, arizona, containers on grand, infill

Id: Ub88mW2HKug

Length: 14min 28sec (868 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 11 2016