In the 1950s, Malcolm McLean developed a modular design that would simplify the loading and offloading of ships, boxing up goods for easier loading and unloading between trains, trucks and boats The standardization of cargo containers revolutionized the modern shipping industry. Today, though, an increasing number of the world’s 20,000,000+ containers are being adapted to new uses, transformed into homes and offices, schools, shops, stages and more.

Proponents of containerized architecture note that the units are generally inexpensive — for many shipping companies, it is easier to sell off unpacked modules than return them to points of origin. Containers are built to be robust and strong, resistant to weather and fire and able to convey heavy loads around the globe. They are also made to be stacked easily on top of one another, which can be useful in creating multistory cargotecture.

Aesthetically, painted metal containers evoke that ever-popular industrial look a lot of people seek out in converted factories with exposed materials. Container reuse can be sustainable, too, particularly when one considers the energy-intensive process of melting them down for recycling. Some container architecture projects take advantage of the mobile and modular nature of the cargo containers used to build them.

For those inclined toward do-it-yourself approaches, the proliferation of online guides offers a starting point to buying and building container homes. As more individuals and companies engage in creative reuses, standardized methods are evolving, too, for making modifications that meet building codes and streamlining processes like permitting and code compliance, together paving the way for future container-based projects.

Shipping container architecture, however, evokes strong reactions from skeptics as well. “The shipping container is to today’s avant-garde architecture what the pipe railing was to the early International Style,” writes design critic Theodore Grunewald, “an industrial objet trouvé; a totem fetishized more for its aesthetic qualities and poetic and symbolic associations than its practicality.” He cites Dr. Richard Williams, a professor of contemporary visual cultures, whose also has reservations: “They’re great for doing what they were designed to do, which is transporting stuff. A simple technology, they have helped facilitate global trade like no other. But they’re designed for things, not people. Dark, damp and airless, boiling in the summer and freezing in the winter, they’re hopeless living and working spaces.”

There is truth in these criticisms. Without significant modifications for controlling indoor climates, for instance, metal container shells make for poor insulators. In some cases, the answer is to more extensively retrofit them, though of course that adds time, cost and environmental impacts. It is worth keeping in mind that (like any design solution) containers will work (or not work) differently in different places. The standardization of containers and their ability to travel the world doesn’t mean that they provide equal architectural benefits around every port of call.

As with any material or building unit, there are going to be specific project, client and site needs and considerations. Individual containers come in standard sizes, which can be an advantage and a disadvantage depending on the desired program and layout requirements. The world is full of buildings made from unusual materials, including hay bales, tires, soda cans and beer bottles — availability and location play a role in where and how each of these works as well. In places where containers are cheap and the climate is ideal, adaptations can be easier and well worth doing.

A lot of container criticism is also aimed at more pie-in-the-sky ideas, like modular buildings with interchangeable parts. These more ambitious and concept-driven designs, including container skyscrapers and mobile city-to-city apartments, may or may not make it off the drawing board.

On the more practical side, though, ever more companies are evolving repeatable and modular solutions, including materials and methods of insulation, plumbing and electrical wiring specifically designed to work with container structures. Such solutions can make it easier to assemble and outfit cargotecture much more quickly than one might erect a non-prefab alternative. In construction, speed and prefabrication is helpful in reducing energy, time and labor inputs.

Meanwhile, municipal authorities and commercial construction firms recognizing these benefits continue to build large cargo container projects, including emergency shelters as well as group homes, community centers, industrial parks and office complexes. To an extent, the cycle is self-reinforcing as well: as more projects get completed, it becomes easier and more efficient for other container architects and DIY builders to start similar projects of their own.

In Newark, New Jersey, a large and deceptively nondescript building is redefining the Garden State, producing millions of pounds of food per year just outside of Manhattan. This 70,000 square foot facility has the equivalent yield of over 5 million square feet of traditional farmland. Inside, a year-round, closed-loop aeroponics system employs no pesticides and requires 95% less water than field farming. This branch of AeroFarms is not alone — it’s part of a food production revolution with projects ranging from at-home and in-store micro-farms to massive facilities set up in old factories and warehouses around the world.

Technically, vertical farming can be done outside, too, by stacking planters in natural sunlight, but indoor vertical farms offer a range of advantages. Inside, there are no seasons and specialized LED lights make it possible to grow plants continuously and cycle through various crops more easily. The controlled environment and standardization of these systems also makes automation easier. In Japan, approaches have gone predictably high-tech, with endeavors like the Vegetable Factory, which is operated entirely by robots.

Spatial containment makes recycling more efficient, mitigates spoilage and reduces the risk of diseases and pests spreading beyond a specific facility. Transportation costs and energy requirements are also reduced for farms that move into old factories and warehouses right in and around cities, putting them closer to consumers. Aeroponics in general also require less material input — mainly mist and air with minimal water and soil — leading to a lighter footprint.

What started in large and independent facilities has begun to spread into mainstream grocery stores and supermarkets, too. A few years back, Target started testing direct retail micro-farms, beginning with leafy greens before moving to tomatoes, peppers and more. Since these kinds of retail spaces are climate-controlled already for the sake of both shoppers and products, less added energy is required to maintain ideal conditions.

In Berlin, a company called INFARM recently partnered with local shops to provide similar in-store services, cutting down on farm-to-table distance right in the heart of a major European metropolis. Meanwhile, in Tokyo, vertical creepers, rice paddies and broccoli fields were integrated into the design of an otherwise Modern-looking office building, brightening up the place while also providing food for the employee cafeteria.

Taking vertical integration a step further, projects like the ReGen Villages aim to incorporate stacked farms directly into residential communities. It may sound impractical or even Utopian, but at its root the idea is relatively traditional: backyard gardens and community gardening are nothing new. Coupled with walkability and density, these kinds of green-centric towns have a lot in common with New Urbanist ideas that go back decades.

Still, it is generally wise to maintain a healthy skepticism when it comes to fresh green architectural trends and technologies and eye-catching renderings. Skyscrapers covered in greenery (or treescrapers), for instance, have proven to be popular but also problematic in practice (catchy conceptual earthscrapers, groundscrapers and sidescrapers, too, for that matter). Sometimes, more practical organic solutions are hiding in plain sight. Take wood, for instance, a historically popular green building material now finding new forms and reaching new heights in tall buildings around the world. Newer is not always better.

Some extreme vertical farming ideas may indeed prove to be far-fetched and unsustainable, but market movements suggest there is a future in these kinds of facilities and approaches. Investors are putting their money where people’s mouths are, buying up disused urban real estate and developing new indoor farming technologies. Already, vertical farming is a $2,000,000,000 industry and experts project it will grow as much as 30% per year over the next decade.

Vertical farms are of course not a complete solution to ongoing threats like climate change and mounting global food crises, but they do show promise — these endeavors are slowly breaking down urban and rural barriers, reconnecting cities with the food sources that sustain them and shortening that critical distance from farm to table.

Years ago in McAllen, Texas, an old abandoned 124,500-square-foot Walmart superstore was renovated and put to new use as the largest single-floor public library in the United States. Across America, many malls have emptied out and thousands of abandoned big box stores sit empty, including hundreds of former Walmarts. Some, though, are getting creative new leases on life, becoming community markets, indoor tracks, gaming spaces, museums and more.

In McAllen, aisles that used to divide shoppers have been adapted or replaced to serve the community. The old Walmart is packed with computer labs, public meeting spaces, a cafe, an art gallery, a used bookstore and more. In other small towns and suburbs around the United States, the generic promise of all-in-one convenience big box stores once offered is being realized in new and site-specific ways.

Designers at the research and development lab of KTGY Architecture + Planning in Los Angeles have particularly inspiring aspirations for old shopping centers: plug-and-play modular prefabs that subdivide big empty boxes into transitional housing for the homeless. This is not the first time architects and designers have attempted creative solutions to this pervasive problem, but it’s notably ambitious.

The firm’s Re-Habit project involves housing as well as support spaces and services fit into unused spaces in big boxes or individual shopping outlet stores like Sears and JCPenney. Self-supporting communal residences, where occupants rotate chores like working in the kitchen or keeping the dining hall clean, are coupled with facilities to providing training and potentially even employment.

Where some might see empty space, others see opportunity. The large, flat roofs of big box stores, for example, are ideal for rooftop gardening, open-air recreation and solar panels — these kinds of uses would pair well with a project like Re-Habit. Many big boxes have outdoor plaza areas (not to mention giant parking lots) that could accommodate small pop-up shops and food carts, too.

Adaptive reuse in the realm of big retail is forward-thinking but also proven concept. Big boxes have been turned into commercial gyms, corporate offices, schools, churches and (yes, this is true) even a SPAM Museum. Whatever the project, it takes vision and resources to turn such dauntingly huge structures around as well as an understanding of the potential pitfalls and unique opportunities of this peculiar building typology.

Such large-scale conversions tend to work best when they take advantage of big box assets and work within their limitations. Generally, big box stores reside in huge buildings that are located in prime spots, often along highways, which makes them accessible but can also make them hard to fill up. They generally have a lot in common, like orientations that lend themselves to being sectioned into bays and limited natural light, features that can work well for things like libraries. Often, though, the best option is simply whatever best fits community needs, which is often a mixed-use program that can more effectively fill out a bigger interior.

Big retailers may be more prevalent in suburbs, but there are some prime urban examples as well. A series of converted Sears plants in major US cities offer a range of realized visions for what big old commercial buildings can become. In Minneapolis, for instance, a massive mail-order Sears plant and retail store was abandoned by its makers for years before being turned into the Midtown Exchange, a busy structure full of restaurants, stores, offices, condos and apartments. It took a lot of players to make this work, including invested city officials and both public and private funding from various sources.

Often, these conversions speak to the character of the cities in which they are located. In Seattle, a place known for its coffee, the city’s old Sears plant now houses the Starbucks headquarters. In Los Angeles, land of Hollywood, a deserted Sears was used for film shoots during its derelict years but is on its way to becoming a residential and commercial hub. Boston and Memphis have converted Sears projects, too — uses are mixed in both cases.

While the individual projects vary, each city has something in common having turned a similarly monumental structure into something new. These various projects fill in gaps and address needs that are fundamentally local. Together, they represent a series of blueprints that other cities can look to, whether they have Sears plants themselves or are simply looking for ways to deal with big old commercial spaces.

Existing examples can provide paths forward, but other architects have grander visions, too, some of which have yet to be tried. Designers could, for instance, build around big boxes on all sides, then turn the central old structures into community hubs or parking lots or productive green spaces. Another option is to tear down sections of roofs and facades, dividing big boxes up into smaller and more manageable units while leaving structural supports intact.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution for disused spaces, but cities, towns and sururbs looking for inspiration have both real-world examples and conceptual designs to draw on. In some sense, the core recipe never changes — for any big transformation project, municipal officials, citizens, developers and designers will always have to come together to find best-fit solutions on a case-by-case basis.

Why should architecture continue to look, feel and function almost exactly as it always has, in spite of a dramatically changing world? Sticking to established conventions is often the easy and inexpensive way to do things, and it’s backed up by decades or centuries of practice. But as we move into a future of climate crisis and other challenges, perhaps it’s time to be bold.

Experimental architecture explores new paths and imagines new ways to meet the needs and challenges of humans in relation to the natural world. It’s not easy to break out of our assumptions about what we think architecture should be; radical new paths often don’t seem possible until we see them in action. Visionary architects and designers make the abstract into reality when they not only conceptualize extraordinary new ways of sheltering ourselves, but test them out in the real world, even on a small scale.

Breaking out of conventions might mean changing how we use our built environments, how they’re oriented, what they’re made of, their shapes or how they’re put together. After a while, if it’s successful, the experimental can become conventional, asking to be questioned and bucked and broken again in favor of something tailored to emerging circumstances. It never stops evolving.

Experimental Shapes & Materials

Reducing waste and pollution should be a major objective of architecture from this point forward, and that might mean shifting away from current construction norms altogether. What if all new buildings were made out of things like super-strong renewable wood, fungus-based self-healing concrete, nano cellulose made of waste materials and 3D-printed sandstone? Bendable concrete, water-saving bricks, cement that absorbs CO2 out of the atmosphere: all of this is possible and more. The ‘Concrete Vessel’ home pictured above, by Atelier FCJZ, features translucent glass fiber reinforced concrete made from recycled construction debris.

Some of the most impressive examples of experimental shapes and materials in architecture result from biomimicry, examining how nature’s forms and processes can help us develop more effective, efficient (and often more beautiful) structures. We see this in Singapore’s spectacular solar-powered Supertrees, a mechanical forest of vertical gardens, rainwater collection systems and conservatories that could theoretically also contain shops, restaurants or housing.

The University of Stuttgart’s carbon fiber pavilions are another striking example, inspired by the lightweight shell encasing the wings and abdomen of a beetle. Woven by robots, the pavilions are able to achieve highly unusual proportions, and they’re unusually strong. Imagine if we built custom structures like this and covered the surfaces with protective membranes to make them into walls and ceilings.

Experimental Construction Methods

Robots will continue to transform the construction industry in the near future, whether they’re building prefabricated load-bearing timber modules, undulating brick walls or 3D-printed fiber composites based on the behavior of spiders and silkworms. Robots can set building materials into place with unprecedented precision, achieve complex geometries and eliminate the need for waste-producing concrete molds.

Another bold move toward truly sustainable architecture is the Design for Disassembly (DfD, or Design for Deconstruction) movement, which considers and plans for the entire life cycle of a structure before it’s built in the name of adaptability and waste reduction. Ways to reuse or recycle every component of a structure using existing recycling streams are built into the designs, which are typically pre-fabricated, pre-assembled and/or modular. Closed-loop construction systems encourage innovation and produce unique aesthetics, as seen in Kieran Timberlake’s Cellophane House and Kengo Kuma’s Cafe Kureon.

Experimental Usage

Conventional architecture is nearly always distressingly ableist. Designed around the needs of a hypothetically “normal” person, it fails to address the reality of diverse bodies and abilities. Accessible architecture and interior design shouldn’t be “experimental,” it should already be a core element of every design, but alas, here we are. Architects can help the world catch up by adhering to the principles of Universal Design, serving as many people as possible without segregating those with different needs and working directly with people who are most impacted by inaccessible structures. The Universal Design Living Laboratory, the top-rated universal design home in North America, offers one example of what this can look like.

Other forms of user-centered design might center upon a social element, like Soar Design Studio’s residence converted to a communal space for local students, or the so-called “dementia villages” granting patients a degree of freedom and community they don’t experience in a typical nursing home setting. Experimental structures might also be placed in unexpected settings to expand access to housing in overcrowded cities, like Matthew Chamberlain’s “street tree pods.”

Top image: robot-built metallic structures by Prix

How is it that a simple, abstract composition of black and white grids and primary colors has touched our collective psyche so deeply? Dutch-born artist Piet Mondrian created some of the most reproduced designs in modern history with works like Composition II (1920), Tableau II (1922) and Composition II in Red, Blue and Yellow (1929). A century later, you can hardly walk a lap around a city block without seeing something influenced by Mondrian’s signature style, and our fascination shows no signs of slowing down.

Mondrian co-founded the Dutch art movement De Stijl (“The Style”) in 1917, which consisted of both artists and architects and is characterized by its rejection of mimesis. Instead of trying to represent or imitate the real world, De Stijl valorizes pure abstraction, reducing a visual composition down to its absolute essentials. Known as neoplasticism, this philosophy “finds its expression in the abstraction of form and color, that is to say, in the straight line and the clearly defined primary color,” as Mondrian wrote at the time.

Though the first case of Mondrian-inspired architecture might appear to be Gerrit Rietveld’s 1924 Schröder House, the architect was actually a member of De Stijl and adhering to its principles. Rietveld collaborated with fellow De Stijl member Theo van Doesburg on a number of striking interiors in Amsterdam, too. But while the influence of De Stijl as a movement is certainly far-reaching, the tributes specifically referencing Mondrian’s paintings are the most readily recognizable to this day.

“It is possible that, through horizontal and vertical lines constructed with awareness, but not with calculation, led by high intuition, and brought to harmony and rhythm, these basic forms of beauty, supplemented if necessary by other direct lines or curves, can become a work of art, as strong as it is true,” Mondrian said.

This single quote may tell us all we need to know about why Piet Mondrian’s work strikes such an enduring chord. While it’s certainly true that efforts to preserve the artist’s legacy by his heirs, among others, helped lead to commodification of his work – you can find everything from Mondrian-themed underwear to cakes on the internet – there’s more to the story. People make and purchase those products because the work speaks to them. As simple as it may be, there’s something about it that still feels fresh and dynamic. There’s a tension between the lines, a sense of expansion when a block of color is bound only by the edge of the canvas, a sense of order despite the seeming randomness of the composition.

Case Study House No.8 by Charles and Ray Eames

Asymmetric and sparing, the artist’s grids, planes and careful use of color easily scale up, practically producing a blueprint for minimalist yet visually engaging designs. In 1945, designers Charles and Ray Eames demonstrated how well Mondrian’s style translated to emerging prefabrication technologies developed during World War II with “Case Study House No.8” in Los Angeles, and it worked so well, the brothers claimed the home for their own usage.

It’s also easy to see how applying the subtle balance of Composition II to the facade of a building, as Studio VZ did in The Hague, can brighten up what might otherwise be an architecturally dull structure. Similarly, creating blocks of primary colors within a largely black and white interior, like Appodeal’s new offices in Minsk by Studio11, can lend to a space an air that’s simultaneously whimsical and sophisticated.

Some designers are so captivated by Mondrian’s use of lines, grids and color that they’ve envisioned houses, yachts and cars using his paintings as a framework or a skin. Vasily Klyukin’s “Villa Mondrian” translates the works to architecture in the most literal way possible and aims to turn vehicles into works of art. Other works, like Marcel Wanders’ Charles Chair and Hugo Passos’ Piet Side Table, find new ways to transmute the essence of Mondrian into functional objects.

If you’ve ever loved a work of art so much you wished you could crawl inside it and live within it forever, here’s one way to do just that. In “Breakfast with Mondrian,” an apartment interior by Bulgarian design studio Brani & Desi, you almost feel as if the designers have magically stretched Mondrian’s paintings into an inhabitable three dimensional space.

Most artists can only dream of making such an impact on the world of architecture and design. Perhaps, at some point, the world will tire of seemingly endless iterations of Mondrian’s most iconic works, but that day probably won’t arrive anytime in the immediate future. Is there an underlooked artist you wish could get the Mondrian treatment?