An unusual pairing of art and industry challenges students to transform a shipping container into an inhabitable, working space.

It was a shipping container that brought UCSB Art Professor Kim Yasuda and Santa Barbara businessman Jorgen Staal ’88 together three years ago. Both could see an afterlife for the hulking, steel boxes that were piling up in ports everywhere. Coming mainly from China, the containers were loaded with a bounty of cheap goods, but not much was going back from the U.S. It was too costly to ship the boxes back empty, so they sat idle.

To Staal and Yasuda, it was an opportunity: Why not turn them into cheap, attractive, eco-friendly housing, workspaces or art studios? Staal, a 1988 UCSB liberal arts graduate, was already in the business of buying, selling and renting storage containers, primarily for storage. The ready-made metal boxes were stronger, more durable than lumber. But could people get past the idea of living in a metal box?

The answer may be in a demonstration project the pair and others are planning to locate on campus by June 2009. The university has given the conditional go-ahead for a temporary installation on West Campus near Cameron Hall to see if container housing can be affordable, attractive and livable. The site will showcase an architecturally designed 400-square-foot house made from two shipping containers and a funkier, art-driven version that Yasuda’s art students cobbled together.

“The shipping container embodies so much of our consumer ways,” Yasuda reflected in a recent interview. The boxes arrive from overseas loaded with big-screen TVs, video games, appliances, gadgets and gizmos. “But we’re at a moment where luxury aesthetics are not appropriate for the time we’re in.”

The green movement has made us think twice about excess. Even if the container-turned-house is a wash in terms of cost, the idea is still worth pursuing, Staal points out: “We’re not cutting down trees.”

The buzz over shipping containers here at UCSB and elsewhere led to a conference on campus in November 2007 that covered their introduction 50 years ago to their globalizing effect on the economy to their reuse now. (Reuse isn’t limited to living space. A third container donated by Staal has been repurposed into a mobile arts lab.)

It was in 2005 that Yasuda’s and Staal’s paths first crossed. His company, J. Staal Storage Solutions, was riding the wave of the shipping container glut. He was thinking beyond simply a storage function for the containers—as were a growing number of architects and others searching for affordable and emergency housing.

He donated a couple of containers to Yasuda who also co-directs the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts, an innovative group that looks to bold, boundary-busting art projects across the UC system. In a one-of-a-kind class, Yasuda and her colleagues Dr. Dick Hebdige and artist Robert Wechsler challenged their art students to transform two containers into one habitable space using their own sweat and recycled materials. The instructors brought in contractors and other trades people to advise the students.
For some students, it required an attitude adjustment. Ten years ago being an artist meant “making things for a gallery,” Yasuda said. She was asking something different: “Artists need to engage their projects within a larger social dimension.”With no prior experience, the students reconfigured and welded the two 20-by-8-foot containers together, cut out an array of windows and skylighting, hung a glass door, added insulation and painted the outside baby blue with decorative scrollwork. The result was an artsy 320- square-foot living space that was unmistakably still a shipping container.

“All my students said ‘I’d live here in a second,’ ” Yasuda said.

But would anyone else? To find out, late last year the institute, Staal and university officials sponsored a competition for architects: Design an attractive, eco-friendly home out of two shipping containers that would pass muster with zoning and building codes, and be producible for under $20,000. (Staal is donating the used 20-foot shipping containers, which he sells for about $1,700, plus delivery.)

Santa Barbara architects AB Design Studios beat out other competitors to win the contest. It is their design–two containers connected by a sort of bridge–that will be built and moved to the demonstration site on West Campus.

The design features the kitchen and living area in one container with a bedroom and bathroom in the other. But the key feature is that more containers can be added in sort of a Legos fashion.

AB Design Studios architect Clay Aurell sees it this way: “A professor lives in one, and he gets married. He adds on another piece. You keep adding pieces.”

Solar panels on the roof power electricity, heat and hot water. The units would be insulated, ventilated and painted light colors to reflect the sunlight. To cut costs, they’d be built off-site and shipped to a location ready to be put together.

Even prettied up, the design still looks like a shipping container on the outside. “There is that stigma,” acknowledges Aurell who worked with colleagues Josh Blumer and Schuyler Bartholomay on the design. But to some, it’s a pleasing, interesting aesthetic. As for the inside, “you probably wouldn’t realize.”

To Aurell’s eye, there are other pluses besides the cost and reuse of the container: “It simplifies life, pares it down to what you really need to live. You don’t need a family room, living room, dining room.”

Staal, who was on the jury that picked AB Studios’ design, said the goal of the competition was to see if a shipping container design could be “cost effective, habitable and legal.” All the answers aren’t in yet, but one of his hopes is that municipalities will buy into the idea.

One other unknown is the availability of shipping containers. The glut was worse five years ago, a good thing for Staal’s company which has five storage yards from Santa Barbara to San Diego holding about 200 containers. “The trade deficit has closed a little,” Staal said during a September interview. “More containers are leaving, but there will still always be a surplus.”