District Home Magazine Fall II October 2014 | Page 22

QA
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with Travis Price of Travis Price Architects
District Home takes an inside look into the use of
shipping containers to revitalize urban life with
warmer, sophisticated modernism that is both
durable and sustainable.
District Home Magazine: What tends to be the most appealing
feature about your custom container homes to prospective clients?
Travis Price: Modernism with its spatial freedom, large views in touch
with nature and urban life, very warm wood interiors that feed our
natural hunger, and an honest use of real containers as an aesthetic;
no phony historic cartoons like a Tuscany house in a rainy Seattle.
DHM: What are some of the challenges you face with shipping
container homes?
TP: The main challenge was not technical, not codes, nor financing.
It was largely a lack of education about the advances of modernism
in the past 2 decades. Most people are now overcoming the initial
“sterile–slick ” modernist image of modern and embracing a warmer,
natural, and more sophisticated idea that modern has many faces
including glass, wood, and functional exposed metal. This is a big
cultural shift in millennials and ironically many retiring purchasers.
DHM: How have you overcome this lack of education and what are
the main takeaways?
TP: Inspired and reasonably easy to build design compositions that
make the ordinariness of corrugated metal, plywood, and large
industrial glass feel more like a sublimely exciting iPhone than a
sterile lost box. The ecological message is met with re-purposed
fallow sea containers and more importantly great natural materials
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are preserved inside with the feelings of nature close to the touch.
People are looking for the honesty of authenticity of the times with
the container as home. Yes they will cost less and that is a great
advantage as well as the speed of construction. Further, they are
even more durable and a much better value for life than standard
stick construction. Whether they will sell for less will be a market
issue, but the bang for the buck is without a doubt a great asset.
DHM: You have been contemplating floating sea container apartments
and a homeless village on the river to serve Georgetown. What do you
envision in a project of this sort?
TP: Besides a larger on-land village of containers in the city, we
would like to float the same 200 units on elegant barges and create
mixed-use containers on the riverfronts. This is done in Holland
and would be an updated and sophisticated Sausalito inspiration.
The best part is that it would create what most Washingtonians
would love most; urban life on the water. This is the future of cities.
The US has an abundance of natural rivers and parks. Cities really
don’t need to keep their River Fronts completely pristine. Bruges in
Belgium, Florence, and Venice, Italy are all echoes of a richer history
of life on the water in a dense environment.This is not only loveable
but also more valuable. Think of the vast amount of money spent
each year to visit such places as well as the huge investment in metal
and glass condominiums and you suddenly realize the containers
are simply an evolution of using less materials and human technical
genius to provide more with less. The river ecology is far better
preserved with responsible living than open parks that are costly
and hard to maintain. Good ecology comes when a person has to
eat and sleep where they live!