Perfect Homes Magazine - Issue 12 | Page 60

Thinking inside the B x New Urban Living Innovative architects turn to shipping containers for affordable housing solutions. Shipping Container Home construction has become one of the biggest home and office construction trends globally. Since 2005 shipping containers began to appear in many news stories in the U.S., Canada, UK, Netherlands, China, Australia, New Zealand, and much of Europe. Shipping container construction has become popular for not only homes, but for offices, hotels, student housing, safe rooms, and emergency shelters. Lemons To Lemonade The original interest began when the world realized that shipping containers were stacking up in the ports of every major city in the world. In the United States alone the estimate was nearly 1 million in 2005. After much publicity and interest, the total in the U.S. is said to have dropped to about 500,000 by the end of 2007. Similar decreases have been seen in many other countries also. It is well known that the rapid growth of manufacturing in China and the global thirst by virtually country for the lower priced, high technology products from China has given to happier consumers and lower prices globally, but the side effect has been the one-way shipping of all the containers bringing the products from China. 60 THE ESSENTIAL COSTA DEL SOL WEBSITE - www.simplymedia-group.com