Good-looking! Homestays, libraries, service stations made of containers
Good-looking! Homestays, libraries, service stations made of containers... the future is beyond imagination
The recent World Cup events have made people pay attention to the fact that stadiums can be made of containers.
With the advancement of technology, the scenarios where containers can be used have far exceeded imagination.
Gubei Container Station
In the warm winter, the Golden City Road in Changning District, Shanghai is when the ginkgo leaves turn yellow. The green and yellow fallen leaves are scattered on the paving bricks of the pedestrian street. With the shops on both sides and the appropriate space scale, the atmosphere of strolling and roaming is overwhelming.
The operator "Dayu Construction" positioned it as a small "generator" facing the community and stimulating various activities, allowing residents, merchants, and visitors living here to establish a warmer connection with the neighborhood.
Few residents and passers-by realize that it is actually a container building. Today's container buildings are no longer the simple metal boxes in the past stereotypes. They can also be full of design.
The original intention of the design was to hope to have an open platform that presents the charm of the neighborhood and promotes the co-governance of the neighborhood, a space that can be shared by community merchants, and a vibrant stage for everyone to create.
The scheme uses local materials to integrate the warm yellow elements of ginkgo leaves with the container hut. The entire side facing the intersection is almost entirely floor-to-ceiling glass doors. The two sides of the container can be fully opened, and the hut can be turned into a three-sided open box, suitable for various interactive activities.
The station uses the concept of participatory design to record the stories of the neighborhood. The main wall material uses 1.6 mm weathering steel; the wall and alloy doors and windows are all prefabricated in the factory, and the doors and windows are spliced after being hoisted to the site; the top solar panels solve the lightweight electricity needs of lighting and air conditioning.
Late one night in November 2020, a large truck brought the hut and hoisted it to the intersection. After landing, several workers began to install it, and it was all completed two hours later.
The designer said that it took only one month for the Gubei Station from the concept proposal, design plan approval, factory production to full implementation. In fact, more energy is spent on communication, polishing plans, and following processes. The actual factory production time is only a few days, and the construction time on the ground is only a few hours.
Such a small station unit is particularly suitable for container buildings. The cost is controllable, the construction period is short, and the steel structure is corrosion-resistant, resistant to 8-magnitude earthquakes, and 10-magnitude hurricanes. It is almost completed in the factory for most of the production, is not affected by the environment and climate, and will not disturb the residents on site, so the residents of nearby communities do not have to be burdened by construction noise.
It also has a key advantage: it does not need to occupy the construction land quota, the approval process is short, and it does not need to dig three feet down, and it will not damage the original ground pavement of the pedestrian street.
Therefore, container buildings are particularly suitable for some harsh environmental conditions, such as sand, mud, and tidal flats, or delicate ground that is not willing to be excavated again.
The characteristics of Gubei Station in the past two years: street-facing, open, beautiful, eye-catching, and highly interactive, like an art installation. Compared with building a traditional station house, the use of container buildings is just right.
Container library under the wind and sun
Container markets and container exhibitions are not uncommon, but to what extent can they be used?
In 2018, the "wiee" World Innovation and Entrepreneurship Expo opened at the Jiading Campus of Tongji University. The Expo lasted for nearly a year. During the year, relevant people from all over the world gathered, and forums, lectures, exhibitions, and creative cultural exchange activities continued. Is it necessary to build a large building complex for an expo of such a large scale and duration? In the end, the organizers decided to build 111 containers on the school's 2,760 square meters of land. The exhibition building formed was enough to be used for one year and easy to dismantle.
When I first saw the site, there were only two large pieces of mud land that had not been hardened, and there was garbage piled up randomly.
The project took two months from organization, design, program modification, process review to completion. If traditional buildings were used, it would take more than half a year for such a scale.
The independent containers did not form the atmosphere of the building complex, so the plan was changed to a container group on the first and second floors, some with terraces, and some interspersed and stacked, which was interesting.
Fortunately, many boxes were put together, stacked and interspersed, and the design blurred the sense of space.
Another problem is drainage. The top of the container is flat and easy to accumulate water. Even if waterproof materials are applied, rainwater will still leak into the inside, and the box must be fully welded. In addition, a U-groove must be added at the joint between the box body and the glass to force the rainwater to "bypass" and increase the slope on the top surface.
The interior of each container is equivalent to an interior decoration, with insulation layer, cutting holes for wiring, air conditioning, etc., and no details are missing.
The final effect is very good. After personalized painting, the container exhibition area is deeply loved by young people from all over the world. It is open, flexible, and multifunctional. It is an exhibition and workshop during the day and a stage at night.
Today, container construction technology has long been updated. The current personalized projects are basically customized in the factory, not second-hand recycling boxes. The height of the metal plate can range from 2.4 meters to 3.4 meters, and it can be spliced arbitrarily to meet the length requirements. The interior decoration process is mature, and it can also be equipped with overall bathroom and other components.
Campus container library in Suzhou
It is a two-story container building with simple and neat lines and clean blue and white color scheme like the sky, showing the high appearance of an art gallery.
When you walk into the interior, the first thing you see is the front hall, which is bright and clean, mainly white. The reading area on the first floor not only has soft sofa seats, a large LED screen, but also smart devices.
The small book room on the side is decorated in a strong British style.
Go up the stairs to the second floor, where the style is completely different. The elements of "Classic of Mountains and Seas" are used as the top, and the traditional wooden bookshelves, tables and chairs set off the antique study atmosphere.
The terrace on the second floor is even more popular, where students enjoy reading time surrounded by trees and blue sky. The solar photovoltaic panels on the roof provide energy for the library.
In short, if it is not specifically stated, no one realizes that the library is actually a container building. The interior space, whether visual effects or functional use, is the same as traditional buildings, or even better.
Nowadays, this type of new container building has a wide range of uses. In addition to exhibitions, it can be used in bars, restaurants, homestays, commercial streets, industrial parks, schools, gymnasiums, emergency rescue, etc. Comfort and aesthetics are no longer a problem.
At the Qatar World Cup, the stadium built with container buildings became a fully detachable large building. Its stands are composed of semi-open seat units. These units do not actually require complex interior decoration. In the current field of container buildings, they belong to a relatively simple type of technology. But the more valuable value of appearing in this World Cup is that it allows more people to see that large buildings can also be flexible, lightweight, and recyclable, and provides a model room.
Flexible "turnaround" to adapt to the future
The theoretical life of container buildings is 25 years, which is enough as public facilities, service facilities, and commercial facilities. Therefore, more and more creative parks and commercial streets are beginning to choose container buildings.
Fengxiang 920 Container Night Market Square in Haikou City, the project has a land area of 46.6 acres, located in the south of Yehai Avenue and the undeveloped land west of Champs Elysées Garden. After the container night market was built, this undeveloped plot of land became an Internet celebrity for a while. Smokeless barbecue, late-night canteen, Internet celebrity shops, music restaurants, performing arts activities, book bars, wedding photography, parking lots, etc. are all available.
Another case is a homestay in Jiaxing. It took about 45 days from the hardening of the ground to the completion of the construction.
Some people worry that the interior of the container house will become simple and feel like living in a shed, which cannot match the comfort of a hotel. In fact, this is a misunderstanding. Customized personalized boutique projects also adopt personalized fine decoration mode in the house, adding insulation layer, laying pipelines, installing wall panels and interior decoration, etc., which is similar to traditional interior decoration projects. It can be built to be no different from high-star hotel houses, plus personalized outer shell painting, which is more attractive to young people.
One of the reasons why this homestay in Jiaxing chose container buildings is that the local geological conditions are poor and it is very difficult to dig the foundation. The traditional construction method takes at least 8 months to build, while the container building only needs a layer of hardening treatment on the ground.
However, at present, the actual proportion of prefabricated buildings in China is less than 5%, which is far behind that in developed countries. Some industry experts predict that the market size of prefabricated buildings in China will reach 2.5 trillion yuan in the next 10 years, and there is huge room for market development.
Among them, the sub-type of containers has become increasingly popular in recent years. Compared with traditional construction methods, it can reduce construction water consumption and concrete loss by about 60%, reduce construction waste and decoration waste by about 70%, save half of the overall energy, and increase production efficiency by two to three times. Low-carbon, environmentally friendly and energy-saving, flexible, light and movable.
More importantly, the approval of container buildings does not occupy the construction land quota. The procedures for using container buildings in sales offices, post stations, exhibitions, and even commercial streets and industrial parks are relatively simple.
In some global cities, mobile hotels, cafes and shops transformed from containers can already be seen on the streets. London uses a container building as a dormitory, which is eight stories high and is a technological innovation.
In the middle of the 20th century, the famous Japanese architect Kenzo Tange started the "Metabolism School", which was once quite influential and influenced a group of well-known architects such as Fumihiko Maki, Kiyonori Kikutake, and Kisho Kurokawa.
They emphasized that cities are constantly growing, renewing, and declining, and strongly advocated the use of new technologies to solve problems, opposing the past view that cities and buildings are fixed places. Their research shifted from architecture to the planning and imagination of future cities. This school believes that architectural design needs to adapt to the organic growth, change, metabolism, and renewal of cities.
In 1966, Kenzo Tange completed the Yamanashi Prefecture Cultural Center. However, due to the limitations of technical means at the time, the operation of unit renewal was still difficult.
Today, container buildings make all this feasible. In the context of increasingly tight urban land use, increasing uncertainty factors, and increasingly diverse renewal needs, container buildings may no longer be synonymous with simple industry, but provide unlimited possibilities for future urban renewal, growth, and response to risk changes.
