Shipping containers are quickly becoming a trendy building material. While hip, they’re also practical. They are solid and much cheaper to build with than conventional construction. Projects around the globe are using them for both lower-income and high-end housing, galleries, mini-stores, and as planned on Genesee Street, restaurants.
Stacking and converting these steel boxes is becoming an attractive option in many urban environments. The affordable and durable building blocks and have become the “it” building material. A residential project combining shipping containers and grain silos was recently profiled here on Buffalo Rising. In the Larkin District, Larkin Development Group is utilizing container-like structures in Larkin Square (below).
In Sacramento, the novelty of shipping containers was a bit much for planners to handle. City officials required the cargo containers at Der Biergarten to be cladded to tone down the industrial look and better fit the midtown neighborhood where the beer garden and restaurant is located.
The early design was considered too “raw” and the city of Sacramento pushed for design changes to make the project look like a permanent structure and not look like a shipping container dropped on a vacant lot. Modifications were required by Sacramento’s Central City Neighborhood Design Guidelines according to city planners. The review process took over a year.
Original Proposal (above) – Approved Plan (below)
From the Sacramento Bee:
The outside walls of Der Biergarten’s shipping containers – a 40-by-8-by-81/2-feet box that serves as the kitchen, bar, ordering station and storage, and a 20-footer that houses restrooms and an office –are now clad in Hardie Board, a durable, flat exterior panel used in housing construction. The panels are painted in muted earthy red, green and gray.
The main shipping container’s interior is covered with drywall, stainless-steel paneling, diamond-plate aluminum flooring and 6-inch tile covering where walls meet the floor, all per Health Department regulations.
Meanwhile, containers have gone big in Vegas. Container Park, a shipping container mall located downtown near Fremont Street, opened in December and serves as an incubator for small businesses. It is built from 40 re-purposed shipping containers. The stacked steel cubes surround a plaza and house thirty design galleries, stores, restaurants, and bars in nearly 19,000 sq.ft. of space. Most of the businesses are owner-operated.
Container Park is a component of the Downtown Project, an effort to revive downtown Las Vegas through art, fashion, business and real estate development. It is largely funded through Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh.