Thinking inside the box

Jonathan Ford, a civil engineer and planning consultant involved in new urbanist development, recently moved his one-man firm into an old shipping container. More specifically, he put Morris Beacon Design into one of 32 corrugated steel shipping containers that have been gathered together in a gritty section of Providence, Rhode Island.

Over the years, proponents of innovative answers to Third World needs have repeatedly tried to encourage people to convert the bulky metal boxes of global commerce into living quarters or other uses. The idea of making office space in a US city out of these eight-foot-wide, 9.5-foot-high, 40-foot-long enclosures, however, is a bit more unusual.

After working for a few weeks in the Providence complex known as Box Office 460, Ford said he likes his shipping container. The structures have been extremely well insulated. There’s plenty of light and ventilation; rectangles were cut out of the metal, allowing operable windows to be inserted. The interior doesn’t feel like a former shipping container. In all, Box Office has a dozen offices, predominantly 320 or 640 square feet, depending on how many containers are welded together.

“It is an awesome place to work, especially given the shared atmosphere with mostly design/entrepreneurial/green tenants,” says Ford. “I bike here from my home on the other side of Providence, about 75 percent of the way on actual bike lanes.”

The location, in the Olneyville neighborhood about a mile west of downtown, is in an industrial area he regards as “on the way to up-and-coming.” It’s within a half-mile walk of Federal Hill, known for its many restaurants.

As for Box Office’s exterior aesthetics, Ford is still working that one out. No consensus seems to have formed.

In Design New England, architectural historian William Morgan compared the project to “a stack of bright blue, yellow, and green children’s blocks,” and praised it as evidence of “an unusually creative city.” David Brussat, tradition-minded architecture critic for the Providence Journal, dismissed the project as “instant slums.” “UGLY!!!,” declared a reader of the Web-based Providence Daily Dose.

“I have gone back and forth on the building’s relationship with the street,” says Ford. It doesn’t form a street-wall like that of many new urbanist developments. But its developer — Peter Gill Case, an architect who founded a firm called Truth Box Inc. — points out that the building comes close to the street, and it possesses the urban virtue of “not having parking in front of it.”

Case sees his unconventional project as a step forward for a district whose buildings range from a mundane, auto-oriented 7-Eleven to a three-story factory building with a corrugated roof. “A little more license” is justified in a setting of this sort, he says noting, “The last thing we want to do is reinforce a 7-Eleven type of building.”

The question of what’s appropriate is “complicated,” Ford says, “because we’re in a unique neighborhood with an old brick/industrial streetscape” and wedged against railroad tracks and the Route 6/10 highway. Box Office stands on a former lumber yard. Says Case: “It’s a neighborhood in transition.”

Joe Haskett of Distill Studio designed the complex for Case, who expected that shipping containers would be a way to build inexpensively. “I had a glassy LEED Silver building” planned, he says, “but I couldn’t afford it after the economy tanked.”

Despite the anticipated savings, the conversion of 94 tons of shipping containers into an intricate three-story structure ended up costing about $130 a square foot, approximately the same as a conventional office building. “A percentage of the cost was due to its being a novel construction type for us,” says Case. “We would save maybe around 5 percent if we built it over again.”

He’s pleased that the project, constructed by a company called Stack Design Build, “uses only a third of the energy of a typical office building.” He believes its green and energy-saving features, which include ultra-efficient heating and ventilation, could result in a 15 percent higher value than a conventional structure in the long run. A study involving CB Richard Ellis, the University of San Diego, and McGraw-Hill Construction recently suggested that “sustainable buildings” will deliver a 4 percent higher return on investment and an extra 5 percent in building value.

Despite predictions that Box Office wouldn’t attract tenants, especially in a city with plenty of vacant space, Case says the complex’s occupancy rate has held steady at about 75 percent since opening a little over a year ago. “It’s a tough economy,” he says, but at Box Office, people “are choosing to pay more than they could pay elsewhere” — mainly because of “comfort, daylighting, and eco-friendly” attributes.

Case is about to become part of a startup enterprise that intends to use shipping containers to create a complex of similar size, but this time in such a way that the units can be taken apart and relocated in the future.

In a time of “Tactical Urbanism,” when a struggling economy has spurred improvisation and unconventional approaches, developments like Box Office may become more common. They probably won’t appear in downtowns or in affluent, tightly regulated suburbs, but they could proliferate in the rougher, partially vacant districts where industry once reigned.

There are plenty of ragged districts of this sort across the US. Some of them may be candidates for an individualistic, tough-looking development — somewhat unpolished, but brisk and energetic. A complex of shipping containers is “bright, cool, and hip,” Case told The Providence Journal. “If it’s not going to generate traffic, who knows what will?”