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"Computer servers are at least as great a threat to the climate as SUVs or the global aviation industry," New Scientist reports.  One server alone, we read, has the "same carbon footprint as your average SUV doing 15 miles to the gallon. Yet, whereas the SUV is seen as a villain from the environmental perspective, the server is not." Note, meanwhile, that I have not independently verified these numbers; I am simply repeating someone else's claims. As Money explained last summer, these "server farms" and "data centers" can each use up to "a small city's worth of electricity" – and most of that electricity goes toward "cranking up the air conditioning to make sure the computers don't literally melt themselves into slag." Returning to New Scientist, we read that, "with more than 1 million computers on the planet, the global IT sector is responsible for about 2% of human carbon dioxide emissions each year – a similar figure to the global airline industry." And here I am, writing BLDGBLOG, doing my part to cut down on the world's use of internet servers...  So what to do? Do we make our server farms hydroelectric? It's already happening. Do we make them wind-powered? Already happening. Do we go solar? That's happening, too. As Business 2.0 wrote back in October: "Massive data centers are vital to the economy. They are also notorious power hogs. If their numbers keep growing at the expected rate, the United States alone will need nearly a dozen new power plants by 2011 just to keep the data flowing, according to the Environmental Protection Agency." And so we read: That's why a small server-farm company called AISO.net (for "affordable Internet services online") has gone completely off the grid. Located 80 miles southeast of Los Angeles in the desert hamlet of Romoland, AISO.net has flanked its 2,000-square-foot building with two banks of ground-mounted solar panels, which generate 12 kilowatts of electricity. Batteries store the juice for nighttime operation. However, couldn't we also just store less information, save two or three – or four – hundred fewer emails, stop being mouse potatoes and go outside for a walk, leaving our servers turned off in the darkness? Sure – or we could build our server farms in Iceland, where geothermal and hydroelectric power is easy enough to find.  In any case, I can't help but wonder if the ecological effects of this archival instinct to preserve the past at any cost – whether we store something inside air conditioned warehouses full of books that no one wants, or in the well-lit galleries of potentially unnecessary new museums, or even out on server farms somewhere in the rainy hills of Oregon – are really worth it. And I can't help but suggest that they're not – even if that means I'll no longer have a place to save BLDGBLOG. But we are making the earth unearthly, through the knock-on effects of global climate change, in order that we might hold onto the human past for another generation – reading old books, preserving films, saving emails.  [Image: The Mare Nostrum supercomputer, Spain; this is not a server room].So is the anthropological project of preserving ourselves really worth its environmental effects? Are we saying that the planet may soon become unrecognizable, even uninhabitable, because of runaway climate change, and yet at least it'll have lots of really great archives...? Is this the long-term historical irony of humanism – with its museums and libraries, its institutionalized nostalgia – that all these air conditioned warehouses and rural server farms don't represent the indefinite continuation of the humanist project but, rather, that project's future ecological demise? (Read more about "green" server farms over on Worldchanging. See also the previous post).
 [Image: The unforgettable final glimpse of a U.S. government warehouse from Raiders of the Lost Ark].
A warehouse is being constructed to house books no one's reading.
"The warehouse is extraordinary," the Guardian writes, "because, unlike all those monstrous Tesco and Amazon depositories that litter the fringes of the motorways of the Midlands, it is being meticulously constructed to house things that no one wants." Those "fringes" are outside London.
"When it is complete next year, this warehouse will be state-of-the-art, containing 262 linear kilometres of high-density, fully automated storage in a low-oxygen environment. It will house books, journals and magazines that many of us have forgotten about or have never heard of in the first place."
The building's temperature will be regulated. It will be sealed against moisture. It will hold copies of books that no one actually cares about.
Indeed, this is where unwanted books "will go to serve their life sentences in a secure environment," the Guardian explains, "thanks to the grace of the provisions of the 1911 Copyright Act [UK] and later government legislation."
In other words, a relatively random piece of 100-year old legislation – dealing with copyright law, of all things – has begun to exhibit architectural effects.
These architectural effects include the production of huge warehouses in the damp commuter belts of outer London. These aren't libraries, of course; they're stockpiles. Text bunkers.
 From the Guardian: "We need this warehouse," says Steve Morris, the British Library's head of finance, "not just because it is cheaper than existing rented warehouses we use in London, but also because we are statutorily obliged to house more and more material." We thus learn that "low use material" is being relocated "from rented warehouses in London to a cheaper facility where the material will be kept in conditions that ensure it is kept as pristine as possible" – and that this move, along with all the "mind-bending logistical problems" inherent in such a task, are simply par for the course in our era's ongoing format wars.
In other words, should we be saving books, CDs, PDFs, MP3s...?
And do we know that anyone will ever use them?
I'm tempted to say that we need an injection of Buddhism – or, at least, the doctrine of non-attachment – into the field of library science. But I'm not a Buddhist, so I'm not going to say that. (Interesting, though, that religious beliefs could affect both the shape and the very existence of libraries).
In any case, last month Anthony Grafton took a long look at the future of the library, gazing upon the history of textual accumulation from the Library at Alexandria to Google's new book-scanning project.
From The New Yorker: When ships docked in Alexandria, any scrolls found on them were confiscated and taken to the library. The staff made copies for the owners and stored the originals in heaps, until they could be catalogued. At the collection’s height, it contained more than half a million scrolls, a welter of information that forced librarians to develop new organizational methods. For the first time, works were shelved alphabetically. Of course, then the Library at Alexandria burned down.
Enter the printing press: The rise of printing in fifteenth-century Europe transformed the work of librarians and readers. Into a world already literate and curious, the printers brought, within half a century, some twenty-eight thousand titles, and millions of individual books – many times more than the libraries of the West had previously held. Reports of new worlds, new theologies, and new ideas about the universe travelled faster and more cheaply than ever before. And, of course, huge new structures took shape, specifically built to house this growing surplus. This surplus was really the archive, and this archive keeps civilization going, with all of its awareness of the past.
Or so we're told.
  [Image: The British Museum Reading Room: top photo via Wikimedia (view huge), bottom photo by Vlad Jesul].
Fast-forward, then, to the present and you'll find even more gigantic air conditioned warehouses under almost continual construction on the sides of Western motorways – and you get some sense of how the quest for unrestricted information retrieval has taken on architectural form.
No matter if no one actually visits these places; they're our era's equivalent of pharaonic tombs. They're time capsules.
Quoting once again from the article by Grafton: "Though the distant past will be more available, in a technical sense, than ever before, once it is captured and preserved as a vast, disjointed mosaic it may recede ever more rapidly from our collective attention."
Perhaps it will take some future moment of cultural archaeology to break into these places, spelunking back into the literate past, to find well-tempered rooms still humming at 50ºF, humidity-free, where the past is refrigerated and Shakespeare's name can still be recognized on the spines of books.
Until then, these warehouses – again, not libraries – will continue to take shape as abstract windowless volumes outside cities on the freeway.
 Finally, I'm reminded of a few lines from The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, in which the book's narrator and his well-read "master," William of Baskerville, break into a labyrinthine library after dark – a library full of mirrors, unmarked halls, and trick doorways. (While lost in the library, the narrator beautifully remarks: "I proceeded as if in the grip of a fever, nor did I know where I wanted to go.")
The architects of the library were, in fact, quite clever, mixing climate control with acoustic design: "The library must, of course, have a ventilation system," William said. "Otherwise the atmosphere would be stifling, especially in the summer. Moreover, those slits provide the right amount of humidity, so the parchments will not dry out. But the cleverness of the architects did not stop there. Placing the slits at certain angles, they made sure that on windy nights the gusts penetrating from these openings would encounter other gusts, and swirl inside the sequence of rooms, producing the sounds we have heard. Which, along with the mirrors and the herbs, increase the fear of the foolhardy who come in here, as we have, without knowing the place well. And we ourselves for a moment thought ghosts were breathing on our faces." "In any case," the book goes on, "we need two things: to know how to get into the library at night, and a lamp."
After all, the narrator then says, "I felt inclined to disobedience and decided to return to the library alone. I myself didn't know what I was looking for. I wanted to explore an unknown place on my own; I was fascinated by the idea of being able to orient myself there without my master's help."
And so he goes, lamp in hand, heading into that unlit space full of books no one's reading, in a surround-sound of breezes, looking for something he knows he'll never find.
 [Image: Bel-Air by Mathieu Lehanneur].These air filters, by Mathieu Lehanneur, seem so hilariously inefficient and bizarre to me, but hey – I love the idea. They turn plants into air filtration machines – miniature ecosystems put to work. Somewhere between a terrarium and biotechnology. The designer himself describes the filter as "a vegetal brain enclosed in an aluminium and Pyrex cranial box." That "brain" then cleans the air in your house for you.  [Image: Bel-Air by Mathieu Lehanneur].More specifically, Lehanneur's Bel-Air system "is a mini mobile greenhouse" that "continuously inhales" air into an enclosed system of "three natural filters (the plant leaves, its roots, and a humid bath)." The air is then released again, "purified." This patented principal has two advantages: Bel-Air is to the American and Asiatic common filter appliances what Dyson is to regular vacuum cleaners. Here, the noxious particles are captured, and transformed inside the system. No more filters to change, and no more clogs. Lehanneur was at least partially inspired by NASA's old research into space gardens, wherein living plants were to be installed on spaceships in order to filter, clean, and continually recirculate the exhaled breath of astronauts. As such, this project reminds me of the oxygen garden from Danny Boyle's film Sunshine.   [Images: The Oxygen Garden from Sunshine, courtesy of DNA Films].There we see a whole room – full of plants, circular fans, UV lights, and timed irrigation tanks (the Earth in miniature, technologically replaced) – built aboard the film's main spacecraft, forming "a natural, unmechanical way of replenishing [the ship's] oxygen supplies." All houses should be greenhouses. Imagine going to work in a place like that – in an oxygen garden – bringing the tropics to an exurban office park near you. Creeper vines, and Pyrex-shelled ferns, and huge corridors lined with orange trees – groves and orchards spiraling above you up stairways and halls. The sheer terrestrial weirdness of flowering species. What is it about plantlife that seems so inherently sci-fi? (For the Bel-Air's complete press release, see Dezeen).
Will an astronomical machine buried in the ice of Antarctica someday reveal what the Earth's core really looks like?  [Image: The IceCube's surface workings, Antarctica; via New Scientist].Last week, New Scientist reported that a neutrino detector called IceCube, once constructed, might just do exactly that. Because the Earth rotates, we read, distant neutrino sources – such as black holes – will be blocked at certain predictable moments by the Earth's core; piecing together all these temporary blindspots, we can then infer the shape of the core itself. It's an absence that generates absences elsewhere.  [Image: A schematic diagram of the IceCube].The "machine" itself, meanwhile, is actually quite extraordinary: incredibly, it will "fill a cubic kilometre of ice" – and yet it's really a buried network of connected glass balls. According to The Daily Galaxy, building the IceCube is less an act of construction than a kind of archaeology in reverse; the process will consist of entombing "glass-globed sensors the size of basketballs on 1-mile-long strings, 60 sensors per string, in 80 deep holes beneath the polar surface." This will then allow scientists to develop, that same writer says, a "library of the universe" – something that would make even Borges proud. So I'm left thinking of at least two things: 1) In John Carpenter's 1983 remake of The Thing, a team of Norwegian researchers finds something buried in the ice of Antarctica; it turns out to be a spaceship... which, according to a later group of American scientists, must have been there for more than 100,000 years.
It's frozen solid, and older than writing.
But what if, down there in the ice someday, we find something not unlike the IceCube – only we didn't put it there, some vast and buried machine with no identifiable purpose, origin, or design?
Or perhaps next year some lone helicopter pilot will go flying around, scanning the ice with radar, only to discover that what appears to be a geological formation is actually a machine, some ancient, hulking technology indistinguishable from bedrock... Or a machine made entirely from ice, still detecting the remnants of galaxies.
Perhaps even telescopes dream.  [Image: A glimpse of the Transantarctic Range].2) I was joking with a friend the other day that Americans are always stumbling upon the face of Christ in unexpected places, and then ending up on CNN. They find Christ on a pancake, or on a piece of burned toast, or on an Eggo waffle (these sightings often involve breakfast foods), or even in the bark of a tree – and the people who discover these faces never once seem to think that what they're suggesting is sacreligious: God has sent unto you his only son... disguised as a croissant.
But what if, after all the numbers are crunched and the maps are made, we find that the core of the Earth looks like the face of Jesus? What then? Nevadan entrepreneurs will suggest that we rescue it, digging it up with diamond drills, polishing it and storing it in a church somewhere.
Imagine the core of the planet on display behind stained glass inside a cathedral near Paris, or down in an old consecrated basement in central Rome. Under armed guard. Why is there not more holy geology?
Someone breaks in, using C4, a pair of infrared goggles, and a lot of rope, and they try to steal the center of the planet... For more on the IceCube and Antarctic science in general give this article in The Economist a quick read – then check out NOVA's round-up of weird detectors. Then, if you're looking for a good book on Antarctica itself, consider picking up a copy of Terra Antarctica: Looking into the Emptiest Continent by William L. Fox (a book previously mentioned on BLDGBLOG here).
 [Image: Algae balloon communities in Iceland by the Philadelphia-based 202 Collaborative].A few years ago I audited a course about Archigram at the University of Pennsylvania, just something to do on a Wednesday morning before I went to work – but one of the things that indirectly came out of that experience was BLDGBLOG. It's interesting to note, then, that one of the other people in that class now writes Brand Avenue; another's work was featured here on BLDGBLOG last year; and, this morning, another course attendee emailed to point out a proposal that he's helped assemble and conceptualize, about hydrogen-powered urban design in Iceland.  [Image: Algae balloons and the houses they serve, by the 202 Collaborative].That project, originally intended for a design competition, imagines carefully engineered algae ponds and balloons of hydrogen gas fueling the Icelandic city of the future. It's Icelandic New Energy (INE).  [Image: An Icelandic hydrogen economy, outlined by the 202 Collaborative; view larger].As the designers note: It has long been known that algae produce small amounts of hydrogen as a byproduct of photosynthesis. In 1999, researchers in Berkeley observed that algae alternate between hydrogen production and normal photosynthesis depending on the chemical environment. Depriving algae of oxygen and sulfur, the researchers greatly increased the hydrogen production and triggered the algae to produce hydrogen for an extended period of time. Another research group also discovered that algae will sustain simultaneous production of hydrogen and oxygen from water by illuminating the algae and depriving it of carbon dioxide and oxygen. Researchers estimate that a small pond (1.5 acre or 10 meter diameter) will produce enough hydrogen on a weekly basis to fuel 12 cars. Of course, a part of me wonders if this whole thing would be easier to solve if we just got rid of those 12 cars – but I understand that that wasn't the point of this design exercise.  [Image: 202 Collaborative].However, referring to things beyond the scope of this project, a part of me does find it a bit depressing that we'll go to all these lengths – we'll totally redesign the industrial base of society – only to jump back into our Escalades and drive out to buy organic cotton Christmas mittens at the local Baby Gap. It seems like an awfully long distance to go to get nowhere, in other words. After all of this, we'll do the exact same things, outshopping one another on greengoods.com and parking our solar-powered sustainable sports cars somewhere in that sprawling tangle of garages and freeways that we never disassembled out back. Everything will be recycled, yet everything will be the same. We'll watch internet sitcoms and judge each other's social value by the hemp dresses that our girlfriends wear. In any case, that's a pet peeve of mine that deals with things well outside of the project featured here.  [Image: A broader view of the plan by the 202 Collaborative; view much larger].These renderings are gorgeous, meanwhile, and they lead me to wonder what Archigram would be doing today, if they had grown up designing in a world powered by alternative fuels. What strange new worlds of hydrogen balloons and algae ponds extending off past the urban horizon might we then see? Crops harvested from the roofs of brick tenements in north Philly. Steel frameworks of solar concentration arrays visible in the cracks between buildings as we step over bio-boulevards and water filtration systems on our way to work. Vast harddrives made entirely from milled crystal move glass elevators floor by floor through the environment ministry, carrying cloned medicinal plant samples up to their examination chambers... All narratives of the future are fair game when you're talking about architectural design. Anywho, although their site is still under construction, be sure to stop by the homepage of the 202 Collaborative. (Thanks, Patrick!)
 [Image: Boutique Monaco by Mass Studies; view larger].I've mentioned architect Minsuk Cho, of Mass Studies, on BLDGBLOG before: he designed the so-called " ring dome" for the Storefront for Art and Architecture's Z-A event last month in New York City, and he collaborated with Jeffrey Inaba's SCI-FI studio to propose an " urban district above the water" in Seoul. I'd say that Mass Studies is hard to beat for sheer spatial interest and originality; witness their Torque House, Pixel House, or Cheongam Media Headquarters, for instance – let alone the famously freaky Seoul Commune 2026.    [Images: Three rendered views of the building's lobby and ground level exterior].Or take a look at the Boutique Monaco, pictured here. The Monaco is "a high-density, massive building for residential/office/commercial/cultural activities to be located in the heart of the Seoul metropolitan life, the area around Gangnam station."   [Images: Day and night renders of the project's exterior, complete with punctuated vertical bays of greenery and residential terracing; view both the top and bottom images larger].As Mass Studies explains: Unlike the existing high-rises where one is segregated from the outside world as soon as he [or she] leaves the ground floor, Boutique Monaco will be a building where at each level will be a vertical open space accessible from different spots in the floor. The exterior, designed in an orthogonal pattern in the interest of efficiency in space allocation, is intended to strike a balanced harmony with the surrounding box-type high-rises. Further: "In the plan for Boutique Monaco, around 172 units are created in 49 different types and sizes and interconnected as if in an enormous puzzle. At the same time, different types of internal/external, private/public areas are to be installed." You can see some of the building's floorplans here.  [Image: A kind of rooftop park and bioscape, complete with what appears to be a helipad].The project can be seen in renderings, drawings, and diagrams on the Mass Studies website – but also now in photographs. The building is under construction even as this post is being written, and it should be open for inhabitation by late summer 2008.  [Image: The Boutique Monaco under construction; view larger].Meanwhile, I don't mean to uncritically promote the actions of a property developer in Seoul; nor do I wish to suggest that because this building has a few trees growing out of it that it's "green." But I do have to say that I like 1) the project's use of materials (the wood cladding inside the vegetated nooks is especially brilliant), 2) the punctuated bays themselves, which break up the facade in a really great way and add a spatially and experientially inspired dimension to the project, and 3) the diagonal bracing, however ornamental and non-structural it may be, of the podium. We may be seeing more and more of these sorts of structural weavings – but that's because they're cool.  [Image: Bracing at the base of the Boutique Monaco; view larger].For other projects by Mass Studies, check out their archives.
 [Image: This post was originally published last winter in Blend, translated into Dutch].
Last winter The New York Times reported on a surprising growth industry in the United States: the physical relocation of old houses.
This is the somewhat surreal activity of transporting entire, intact buildings from one place to another, often over more than one hundred miles.
A single-family home, for instance, will be "jacked up" – like a car with a flat tire – so that "long steel beams" can be inserted between the house and its foundations. Very slowly, the house is then disconnected from the surface of the earth and loaded onto the back of a lorry.
If you think that sounds easy, however, bear in mind that some houses "have to be broken into two or more pieces" during this process and the roofs must often be removed. Removing the roofs streamlines the structures for highway transport, allowing them "to pass under power lines, bridges and trees" as they make their way to a new location. After all, as one whole house relocation client jokes: "The last thing you want is to show up one morning and find they’ve lopped off a room during the night."
 [Image: Photo by Stewart Cairns for The New York Times].
Transporting an intact house along the American interstate highway system can take several days. Worse, it can "cost hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars." One such relocation job was so complex, the article explains, that it "required the bulldozing of a temporary access road," and that was simply to remove the structure from its original plot of land.
But, even then, the troubles aren’t over.
After a house has been installed on its new foundation, it might need to be re-assembled – and this means "putting the house back together from thousands of pieces" while carefully following page after page of engineering notes, photographs, drawings, and detailed architectural plans so that you don’t put anything back in the wrong place.
 [Image: Photo by James Edward Bates for The New York Times].
My first thought when I read this was of all those dinosaur skeletons now standing silently in museums around the world. What if someone, somewhere, got something wrong? What if they used the wrong skull on the wrong spine – or they attached the wrong leg, the wrong jawbone – and so the whole bodily form needs to put together again, perhaps with pieces from other dinosaurs in other museums far away?
Because what if your house gets moved three hundred miles but the bedroom is inadvertently attached to the wrong floor? Or two entire houses get mixed up along the way – what strange new architectural styles might result?
These are more than rhetorical questions.
Just last week, for instance, Christopher Hawthorne wrote a short article for the L.A. Times about a single family house that literally crashed onto the side of a freeway in Los Angeles.
 [Image: Photo-illustration by Aaron Goodman for the L.A. Times].
Soon known as the Freeway House, "the single-story structure had been on its way from Santa Monica to Santa Clarita a few weeks ago, riding atop a trailer, when it smashed into an overpass and came to rest on the shoulder of the 101 in the Cahuenga Pass."
It then just sat there.
For 10 days.
 [Image: Photo by John Fuentes, found via the L.A. Times].
It was an uncannily accurate, if entirely unintentional, comment on life in today's Los Angeles: a house stranded on the side of a freeway, with no context or human history in sight.
But what, I might ask, would have happened if the Freeway House had not crashed into a bridge but into another tractor trailer, carrying another house, and those two structures had then merged – even if only temporarily, in mid-air, a kind of post-deconstructive act of architecture lasting mere milliseconds in a cloud of debris above the L.A. freeway system – and then a third building, and a fourth...?
Soon architecture schools are teaching their students as much about car crashes as they are about CAD.
In this context, perhaps the crash could be a future strategy for architectural design: load the Taj Mahal, the Vatican, something by Mies, and an entire American suburb onto three dozen lorries, then crash them all together on a remote German autobahn. Photograph the results.
J.G. Ballard would be proud.
In any case, the whole-house relocation industry would have it so much easier if residential structures were built to move in the first place. The internal structure of a building could incorporate wheels, pulleys, gears, and other machine parts, thus allowing the house to be reconfigured, even geographically relocated. A building could simply attach itself to the local railroad tracks and slip away…
You report your house missing – but Interpol soon finds it: its windows have been smashed and it's covered in graffiti, and it's sitting next to a road outside Thessaloniki.
It misses you.
 [Image: Corb v2.0 by Andrew Maynard].
With these thoughts in mind, then, I got an email from Australian architect Andrew Maynard announcing a new project that he and his office had just finished putting together.
Maynard’s Corb v2.0 is a speculative housing complex that serves to update Le Corbusier’s old idea of the house as “a machine for living in” – and Maynard takes that statement to its logical extreme.
He proposes permanently incorporating a cargo container-stacking machine into a new residential suburb. The machine would thus rearrange all the houses on a near-continual basis.
  [Images: Two views of Corb v2.0 by Andrew Maynard].
If a family doesn’t like where their home is located, they simply wait another day: “Yesterday this was a penthouse apartment on the other end of the complex,” Maynard explains. “Today the family has returned to find it on the ground floor.”
You can move up, down, left, right – even turn 180º around and face the other direction. You see sunset instead of sunrise, or a forest instead of a lake.
   [Images: Three more views of Corb v2.0 by Andrew Maynard].
As Maynard describes it, this gigantic, crane-like stacking machine would smoothly glide back and forth over lines of “movable housing modules.” Residents could wake up to find themselves elsewhere, perhaps closer to the parking lot; neighbors would always have new neighbors.
This way, “everyone gets a penthouse as often as they get a ground level apartment” – which has the effect of “transforming traditional real estate valuations.”
 [Image: Corb v2.0 by Andrew Maynard].
Taking this yet further, though, I'd suggest that we need more than isolated clusters of container-homes, each connected to one stacking machine. We need thousands of these things, aligned in continuous routes like train tracks, connecting neighborhoods, cities, countries, and continents. A house in the U.S. soon shows up in Mexico; a house in Utrecht moves to Sri Lanka. Immigration laws are rewritten, with complex architectural sub-rules. Customs officials the world over are required to take summer classes at SCI-Arc. Criminal homeowners shift back and forth across the International Date Line, avoiding taxes – while astronauts look down at great crowds of houses: whole cities migrating in a web across the earth.
Every once in a while, though, kicking off new schools of architectural thought and theory, there is a Great Accident. Architects stop reading Paul Virilio to concentrate on derailing entire cities...
(For more Andrew Maynard on BLDGBLOG see Unhinged and treeborne. For more posts that originally appeared in Blend, meanwhile, don't miss Fossil Rivers, The Weather Emperors, Urban Knot Theory, Abstract Geology, Wreck-diving London, and The Helicopter Archipelago).
Flavio Galvagni of Lab Zero has a few projects that I think deserve mention here.  [Image: The solar-powered Minimum Mobile Module by Lab Zero].Let me say right away, though, that I know a lot of people are tired of shipping container architecture – in fact, I think most people are tired of shipping container architecture – yet I have a fairly limitless patience for this sort of thing. Actually, I love shipping container architecture. But the same questions inevitably arise whenever things like this re-appear in the blogosphere: Are shipping containers comfortable? Is reusing them as a form of readymade architecture even structurally realistic? Would anyone really want to raise a family inside one of these things? And does the appeal of such designs actually cross cultures and income levels and ethnicities and, more important, climates? Sure, these might work in Santa Monica – but would they work in Minneapolis-St. Paul? To which I would have to say that the answer is: no, they probably aren't that comfortable when it comes to raising two and a half kids – and they probably don't equally appeal to, say, bedouins, Russian oil tycoons, Detroit's inner city poor, suburban parents, or even BLDGBLOG readers. But I don't think those are the right questions to ask. I don't think the point of cargo container architecture is for us to pretend that it's a universally appropriate design solution for every situation that could possibly exist in the world today – because it isn't. Then again, nothing is universally appropriate in architecture. What I think is, actually, the point of reusing shipping containers as architecture is: 1) when you can, you should reuse existing materials for somewhat obvious environmental reasons, and 2) the spatial, logical, and combinatorial systems that cargo containers imply are simply awesome. The possibilities excite me. Container-made buildings are fun to look at, they're fun to render, and they're fun to imagine forming new architectural reefs and Tetris cities, interlocking in a sci-fi future coming soon to a landscape near you. Whole new outer districts of London made from shipping container towers!  [Image: The Minimum Mobile Module by Lab Zero; view larger].So arguments about the architectural reuse of shipping containers shouldn't be based on the claim that it's all or nothing; it's not either we replace all existing architecture in the world with cargo containers and then force everyone to live in them or we never construct a single cargo container building anywhere ever again, even for something as simple as a meditation retreat in your own backyard. Maybe only one cargo container building will ever be built again – or maybe none will – but that doesn't mean we can't still screw around for hours on end with them on our home computers, virtually assembling weird new unfolding structures or houses with legs or helicopter-borne instant cities simply because it's fun and a way to kill time. In other words, even if these plans serve as nothing but design exercises – studies in volume, combination, and color – then that's fine with me. We can be done with the ongoing arguments and just enjoy looking at cool imagery. But I digress. Lab Zero has put together a number of cool projects, including the solar-powered Minimum Mobile Module, pictured above, and the Carapace House, below.  [Image: The Carapace House by Lab Zero; view larger].The Carapace House – a larger diagram of which can be seen here – is intended for use in "challenging natural environments." Similar to Lab Zero's own Drop Off Unit, the Carapace House is temporary, mobile, and easy to "drop off" in a variety of locations.  [Image: The Drop Off Unit by Lab Zero; view larger or in more detail]. All of which brings us to the Jellyfish House – not that Jellyfish House – a kind of floating tower perfect for those of us interested in "spatial delocation." You can drift around the world's oceans in it, reading William Gibson.  [Image: The Jellyfish House by Lab Zero; view bigger].The Lab Zero website is still apparently under construction, meanwhile, but keep your eye out for more of their work in the future. They were featured in Actar's recent book Self-Sufficient Housing, for instance, and will no doubt be popping up elsewhere soon. And for more cargo containers on BLDGBLOG see Container Home Kit or even Project Blackbox.
 [Image: A project by Brendan O'Grady/nocturnal design lab, suggesting what an inhabited billboard mast might look like; view larger. For another such project see BLDGBLOG's look at the awesome Single Hauz. O'Grady's design was produced for, and won an award as part of, the 2007 KRob architecture competition; found via Archinect].
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