Student Work: Cargo Hotel

"....As far back as he could remember, Joey never followed the crowd and always had his own agenda. Rather than participating in the usual school activities, he could typically be found exploring the local train yards. As time passed and Joey grew older he never lost his fascination with alternative life styles. The original passion slowly developed into an exploration of adaptive reuse.

Using recycled shipping containers and old industrial building supply as his main construction materials significantly reduced the start up money required for Joey to put his plan into action. At the same time, the visceral attitude expressed by such deteriorated supplies could potentially allow Joey to make two very bold statements. On the one hand, the containers could be completely remodeled and used to show what bright, luxurious spaces they could be transformed into. On the other hand, container cities could be built out of almost untouched containers, forcing passersby to experience and reflect upon a waste that they indirectly created. "

The body of work presented was originally produced for my second year sustainability studio. The site itself was located adjacent to the property of an old convenant and directly in view of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. For this project I intended to utilize the unused shipping containers commonly found at abandoned freight yards and ports in a sort of adapative reuse, hoping to ultimately design a modest sized hotel.

From my research, I was able to determine that there are currently a significant amount of unused cargo containers within a fifty mile radius of the proposed sight. To conduct this research I initially studied the official 2010 Philadelphia Industrial Landuse Atlas and began to map out industrial lots old and new. After completing this series of diagrams, I used images borrowed from google maps to determine rough estimates of the existing containers in each location.

Upon completing the project, I was left with the feeling that using freight containers would not in fact be sustainable. More specifically, the embodied energy required to transform an old container into a liveable structure would far exceed the benefits from recycling. Additionally, if one is to think about the total cost of retrieval (shipping cost, fuel prices, amount of energy wasted, etc.) the whole idea begins to seem somewhat impractical.

Nonetheless, I enjoyed working on this project and exploring the potential uses of unused freight containers. I had also discovered from my research that there are a system of freight train lines (active and in active) that come very close to both container dumps, and the proposed site. Thus being said, maybe it would be possible to devise an entire system in which containers are picked up by active trains that would already be passing nearby the site, reducing the cost and negative effects of transportation?