SHIPPING CONTAINER PURITY

There is always an unarguable purity when shipping containers are used in architectural contexts. The pure form / Conceived as pure utility / Is then shifted into another realm of functionality and utility. Uses of shipping containers, of course, abound. They have been modified as houses, offices, art spaces, etc.

But nothing prepared me for the ground level shock that I experienced when I came around the corner in Christchurch, New Zealand, just over a week ago, and saw this, photo below. At first, I did not know what it was. Why were the shipping containers stacked up in front of the building? How could it look so graceful and elegant?

After walking around this end of the building for a few minutes, it became clear that their function is to keep the building from falling into the street if another earthquake hits Christchurch. This building was damaged during the 2011 quakes. It is on Lichfield Street. There is no structural connection between the containers and the building: this is clear when you look down the slot between the containers and the building. The containers are a scrim. They are a shield. They are a future imprint. And their relationship to the building is incredibly pure.

The building has three floors, and there are six levels of the containers. The building has a symmetrical facade, and the containers are stacked with near symmetry to the building, two across. Because the earthquake made the building temporary, so are the containers. The earthquake lowered the value of the building, and shipping containers are equally low cost: possibly there is a parity. The building continues to support itself, and the containers are self supporting. The two deep stacking of the containers at the bottom and the single layer at the top is a graphic of the loads that would be imparted if the building collapses.

The last time that these pages recorded this level of purity was at the Cemetary de Montjuic in Barcelona. In that instance, the building block for the architecture was nothing other than the funerary container of a human. I just don’t think that the melding of function and form ever gets better than a piece like this. The element of function is combined so that there is no difference between the function and the form. The function is the form. This melding of function and purity shames us all.

Two days after we left Christchurch, there was the horrific white supremacist massacre in the Al Noor Mosque and the Linwood Islamic Centre. As one New Zealander said to us, the injury seems compounded given what residents had and continue to go thru after the 2011 earthquakes.

I just don’t think that the purity of shipping containers are going to help resolve racial hatred. Or to say that another way, what if we did drawings which knowledge how shipping containers might indeed be used to address racial hatred?