Shipping containers have long attracted architects as an off-the-shelf, transport-ready, stackable building component, particularly for short-term developments that can be picked up and relocated once a site’s use changes. Fitted with proper doors, windows, plumbing and electrics, a standard container becomes a low-cost, fast-to-build home or studio.
Container City at Trinity Buoy Wharf in Londons Docklands is one of the clearest examples of the idea built at real scale. The project was the brainchild of Eric Reynolds, managing director of Urban Space Management, who was looking for a way to provide workspace at a construction cost low enough to keep rents affordable for artists and creative startups, a problem London still has not solved two decades later.
The first phase, completed in 2001, rose three storeys and provided 12 work studios; a further floor added in 2003 brought three additional live-work apartments. The containers were prefabricated off-site and upgraded to meet local building regulations and the thermal and acoustic performance standards a permanent occupied structure requires, not simply stacked as-is.
Nicholas Lacey and Partners served as architect, with Container Space Ltd as principal supplier. The project remains a useful reference point for anywhere facing the same underlying problem it was built to solve: how to deliver decent, code-compliant housing or workspace quickly and cheaply using an industrial component that already exists in vast global surplus.
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