Ariel Sharon Park in Israel is planned to be a stunning ecological retreat in the middle of a densely populated urban area. The site was once an enormous landfill, but today it is being turned into the largest urban park to be built anywhere in the world in the last century. One of the centerpieces of this oasis will be the ECOntainer Bridge, a 160-meter-long bridge made of repurposed shipping containers.

In keeping with the ecological theme of the new Ariel Sharon park, the bridge – designed by Yoav Messer Architects – is composed of recycled waste. These shipping containers were among the 800,000 or so discarded every year. The architects turned these wasted cargo containers into a beautiful and functional space.

Far from being simply a conveyance over a body of water, the ECOntainer Bridge is an attraction unto itself. It features numerous observation points and exhibition spaces, making it into a fascinating space rather than just a way to get from one side of the park to the other. Available only to pedestrians and light vehicles, the bridge will be a tranquil structure free of cars.

(all images via: designboom)

Thanks to the modular nature of the cargo container bridge, most of the construction can be done off-site. The containers also lend themselves well to quick and easy repairs and upgrades. When work must be done on one part of the bridge, removing and swapping out parts is much quicker and simpler than it would be with a conventional structure.

Portable, durable, stackable and readily available all over the world, shipping containers are the ideal building blocks for smart structures of practically every variety. Some require just a little bit of renovation to transform into tiny houses or mobile offices, and others are barely recognizable. Often left with their exteriors as-is to pay tribute to their industrial origins, shipping containers can be used to form exterior walls and integrated into other types of building materials. Here are 23 examples of shipping container architecture in the form of homes, schools, offices, retail stores, hotels and restaurants.

Homes

Two-Tree House by Golany Architects (image via: treehugger)

Project ARQtainer (images via: arqtainer.cl)

Decameron/Marcio Kogan (images via: archdaily)

Colorado Home by Studio H:T (images via: archdaily)

Dark and tightly enclosed, shipping containers may not seem like a fitting material for a comfortable home, but architects and home builders are transforming them in a variety of surprising ways. Take Golany Architects’ Two-Tree House, in which a shipping container was integrated into a design that accommodates two large existing Jerusalem pines on the building site. Aside from the shape, you’d never guess that the basis of the home is a shipping crate, especially since it has been covered in warm and welcoming timber cladding.

Five bright yellow steel shipping containers were combined into a large and light-filled home in Santiago, Chile. Project ARQtainer is an earthquake-resistant, low-cost home that makes use of the strength, durability, stackability, modular form and ready availability of shipping containers. Another shipping container home in Sao Paulo, Brazil by Marcio Kogan employs the stackability to fit a spacious home into a small plot of land, painting each one a bright shade.

And in Nederland, Colorado, an unusual home by Studio H:T places two shipping containers on either side of a taller volume for 1,517 total square feet and an exterior that blends nicely into the landscape.

Schools

Vissershok School (image via: archdaily)

Morpeth School (images via: container city)

Dunraven Sports Hall (image via: archdaily)

Fawood Children’s Center (images via: arcspace)

With cramped budgets, rapidly deteriorating structures and growing populations but little space to expand, many schools across the globe turn to low-cost, portable structures. But the prefabricated classrooms typically used by school systems are often lacking in the design department. Shipping containers offer an ideal alternative. For example, the Vissershok Primary School in South Africa has a container classroom that hosts 25 students, adding a secondary roof for cooling and integrating an attached play area. The Morpeth School in London is very similar, but with multiple stacked containers.

Three walls of stacked shipping containers come together with a fourth translucent polycarbonate wall to create an eye-catching, bright and low-cost sports hall for the students of Dunraven secondary school in London. Interior cutaways on the containers turn them into balconies, while exterior cutaways let in sunshine.

At the Fawood Children’s Center in London, shipping containers are connected with walkways and stairs for a large complex with a nursery, adult education center and offices.

Retail

PUMA City (images via: archdaily)

DeKalb Market (images via: architizer)

Stockbox (images via: design boom)

Re:START Mall (images via: inhabitat)

Whether mobile or stationary, shipping containers are also a great starting point for retail stores small and large. PUMA City is an excellent example of creative deployment of these crates. Architecture office LOT-EK stacked 24 containers to create a 3-story store with a bar/lounge area and 2 decks – and best of all, it’s easily disassembled so the store can travel around the world.

Brooklyn’s DeKalb Market is made from 22 salvaged shipping containers, bringing local entrepreneurs together into an outdoor market with shops, restaurants and cafes. Most of the containers have been left in their original state on the outside, paying tribute to the history of the commercial port location.

Shipping containers are also a smart way to bring small markets into urban food deserts, where convenience stores are often the only source of food. Stockbox offers essential grocery items and fresh produce, and can easily be set up in the parking lot of an existing business.

In New Zealand, shipping containers enabled rapid construction of a mall after many structures were destroyed in a devastating earthquake. The pedestrian shopping mall consists of stacked, brightly colored crates holding 27 stores.

Office/Commercial

Cargo/group8 (images via: archdaily)

Platoon by Kunsthalle Graft (images via: archdaily)

Lafayette Street Offices (images via: container city)

Off-Grid SPACE office (image via: designboom)

16 recycled shipping containers create individual private offices within a large white space in the Geneva headquarters of design collective group8. The rustic, industrial nature of the crates contrasts with their glossy modern surroundings. For PLATOON KUNSTHALLE in South Korea, 28 crates were stacked to create the exterior walls of a large communicate platform for subcultural creative fields, and many of the crates were given an entirely transparent wall to combat the dark, enclosed environment.

Bright red shipping containers contrast with brick historical buildings on Lafayette Street in New York City. Designed by Urban Space Management, this concept was proposed to add office space to the block, but it’s not clear whether it will ever actually be built.

On a smaller scale, Houston-based architecture practice Metalab demonstrates how individual shipping containers can serve as mobile, off-grid offices. ‘SPACE’ (solar powered adaptive containers for everyone) is a prototypical adaptation featuring a fold-out solar rack system with 20 solar panels on the roof.

Hotels

Travelodge Travelpod (images via: travelodge)

Travelodge Shipping Container Hotel (images via: world architecture news)

Luxury Hotel in China (images via: inhabitat)

25hours Hotel in Berlin (images via: dezeen)

While Travelodge’s ‘Travelpod’ hotel room concept wasn’t actually made from a recycled shipping container, it certainly could be – and promotes some intriguing ideas for rentable traveling spaces that can be carried on trucks and ships or placed on location at festivals. But the hotel chain did employ shipping crates for its hotel in Uxbridge, England. The completed design is made from 86 prefabricated shipping crates, which were retrofitted into bedrooms and bolted into a steel frame. This means that when the hotel needs to be remodeled, switching out the rooms will be fast and easy.

Set to open in August 2012, China’s five-star Xiang Xiang Xiang Pray House Hotel is made entirely from shipping containers. It doesn’t look like much on the outside, but each of the individual containers has been fitted with a luxurious blend of traditional Chinese and modern decor.

In Berlin, several weathered shipping crates were worked into the design of the 25hours Hotel. Stephen Williams Associates designed the hotel to capture the feel of a shipping warehouse with guest rooms as intimate as ship cabins. In this sense, the crates are used to impart a certain ambiance in fitting with a theme. In fact, the designers boast, “The ‘Hafen Sauna’ is on the rooftop built within a rusty container with panoramic views over the industrial harbor. It is the furthest from wellness that one could imagine.”

Restaurants

Wahacas (images via: dezeen)

Del Popolo (images via: inhabitat)

Starbucks Seattle (images via: smart planet)

8 stacked shipping crates in relaxing pastel colors draw hungry passersby into the new Wahaca mexican restaurant at the Southbank Center in London. The crates create a two-story structure with a central glass atrium and a cantilevered top story that provides a view of the Thames River.

Another restaurant, Del Popolo, uses the compact portability of a shipping container to take its pizza on the go. The traveling restaurant has a glass wall so diners can watch as their pizza emerges with cheese bubbling from a traditional 8,000-pound wood-fired oven.

Even larger chains like Starbucks are taking advantage of the shipping container craze. The coffee giant just opened a new location outside of Seattle that’s made from four crates. The small size may disappoint coffeehouse loungers armed with laptops, however: it’s walk-up or drive-through only.

Homes, apartments, offices, emergency shelters – cargo containers are a quick, low-cost, environmentally friendly building block for all of these architectural purposes and more, including massive urban projects that can involve stacking the crates nine stories in the air or grouping thousands into sprawling temporary markets. These 13 shipping container buildings show just how useful these durable, modular, pre-fabricated crates can be.

Dordoy Bazaar, Kyrgyzstan

(images via: inhabitat)

Over 7,000 double-stacked shipping containers make up the kilometer-long Dordoy Bazaar in Kyrgyzstan, one of Asia’s biggest marketplaces. Employing more than 20,000 people, the Dordoy Bazaar is packed with practically all imaginable goods and its architecture is almost 100% reclaimed

Container City II, Pinchin Street Studios & The Riverside Building, London

(images via: containercity.com)

A system for quick, eco-friendly, inexpensive housing and other structures devised by Urban Space Management Ltd, Container City has been used to create no less than 20 buildings in the London area including live/work space, classrooms, a youth center and a sports hall. Three of those projects, pictured above, include Container City II, Pinchin Street Studios and the Riverside Building, all used as studios and office space.

Freitag Retail Store, Zurich

(images via: archicentral)

17 rusty recycled freight containers tower into the sky in a precarious-looking structure connected only with elements from the shipping industry to ensure that the building will someday be easy to disassemble. It’s a fitting building for the flagship Freitag retail store, which sells bags made from recycled tarps.

Midtown Container Mall Concept

(images via: curbed)

If the creative minds at LOT-EK had their way, Midtown Manhattan would include quite a showpiece of container architecture in the form of a bright red nine-story mall. Their concept for the corner of 42nd street and Fifth Avenue would give each store a single crate, and shoppers would meander along a system of catwalks, elevators and stairs to get from one store to another as well as to the adjacent building.

Cargotecture Buildings, Seattle

(images via: archdaily)

Seattle’s first cargo container buildings, known as ‘Cargotecture’, bring over 7000 square feet of office space and a retail showroom to the city in a modern design by HyBrid Architecture & Assembly. Using these prefab modules cut construction costs by 20% – 40%, and it only took four hours to put the containers into place with a crane.

Nomadic Museum by Shigeru Ban

(images via: nyc-architecture.com)

Shigeru Ban’s Nomadic Museum definitely uses cargo containers in a big way, making them the main element of this 45,000-foot-long traveling art exhibit. Made to be easily disassembled and moved to a new city, the Nomadic Museum  – housing the Ashes and Snow photography and film exhibition by Gregory Colbert – visited New York City, Santa Monica, Tokyo and Mexico City between 2005 and 2008.

Utrecht University Student Housing

(images via: inhabitat)

With the shipping containers slightly modified so that the ends taper, the container housing for students at Utrecht University in the Netherlands gets a unique look in a rainbow of colors. The texture of the containers is also smooth rather than the usual corrugated steel.

Keetwonen Container City, Amsterdam

(images via: tempohousing.com)

Amsterdam’s Keetwonen student housing complex is the largest shipping container city in the world with 1,000 apartments. Each modular unit is forty feet long and one end is entirely glass, allowing for a surprising amount of natural light. Every apartment even has its own balcony. The units were arranged into ‘blocks’ with little courtyards and the complex contains a cafe, supermarket and offices.

Platoon Kunsthalle Gwangju, South Korea

(images via: kunsthalle-gwangju.com)

Dark gray and orange cargo containers are stacked together to make up the Platoon Kunsthalle art center in Gwangju, South Korea. The containers were arranged to create a large open area in the center. Say the architects, “As a social sculpture the art is created by the existence of this venue and its interaction with the people. It is not a white cube to display finished art pieces of international artists for mere consumption. Cultural development will be experienced by new art strategies which pose questions of contemporary life and a global society.”

Seventh Kilometer Market, Odessa, Ukraine

(images via: weburbanist)

Located seven kilometers outside Odessa city limits in Ukraine, hence the name, the Seventh Kilometer Market covers over 170 acres and consists of untold thousands of steel shipping containers where vendors hawk everything from suspenders to Gucci handbags of dubious authenticity. Just like the Dordoy Bazaar, the containers are double-stacked; it could take days to navigate the market in its entirety.

Travelodge Made from Containers, London

(images via: the metro)

It was complete ten weeks faster and for nearly half a million dollars less than a conventionally built Travelodge, and once the facade was put on, you couldn’t even tell that it was made from shipping containers. 88 containers were retrofitted in China, shipped to the UK and used to create the 8-story Travelodge in West London. Builder Verbus Systems claims that it reduced on-site waste by 70% using this method of construction, and plans to build another container Travelodge at Heathrow Airport.

There may be no such thing as a free lunch, but a Subway sandwich shop made of shipping containers is helping workers at the World Trade Center building site get their noontime grub on more efficiently. The shop will rise along with the building’s construction to its eventual 108-story height, making it easier for construction workers to grab lunch. They don’t have to descend to ground level to grab a bite, so they can spend their 30-minute lunch breaks actually enjoying lunch.

The unique Subway shop is made up of nine shipping containers. The three-story structure – complete with an eating area and a compost unit to recycle waste – is perched on a hydraulic platform in the middle of the building’s frame. Like all other Subways, this one features fresh, baked-on-site bread. It also features a full menu, but will provide workers with some menu items not available at any other Subway: hot dogs, hamburgers and New York pretzels.

The Freedom Tower, more formally known as One World Trade Center, will be the main building at the former World Trade Center site. The building has been under construction since 2006, but only recently did the construction reach a significant height above ground level. In December of 2009, this Subway restaurant was put together to make lunchtime easier for the builders: when the structure is nearly complete, it will take around 45 minutes to get to the bottom from the top. The on-site eatery gives workers tasty, fresh food without having to spend their entire lunch break traveling to and from a restaurant.

Although the high-rise hoagie shop is great advertising for Subway, the restaurant got the contract because they were willing to take on the project at cost. They’re not making a profit on the food, but they are giving workers a welcome break from cold meatloaf sandwiches. And as for the restaurant itself, it’s one of the most creative uses of shipping container architecture we’ve seen yet.

Recycled shipping containers are known to building designers and architects for their low cost and ease of use. They have been used in the construction of homes, housing developments, offices and commercial space for several years already, but there’s a new segment of architecture coming out of the woodwork to take advantage of this unique material: lodging and education facilities. Both are typically concerned with price and with the ease of installation of any new facilities, and shipping containers meet their requirements. These school, hotel and community center designs all take advantage of the many benefits offered by steel cargo containers. Click the thumbnails below for more images of and information on these amazing designs: