Scottish artist David Mach is best known for his sculptural installations and surreal collages, but his largest work yet turns a heap of 36 red shipping containers into a new arts and event space in Edinburgh. Named Mach1, the unusual building is a collaboration with architecture studio Dixon Jones, and will add a new point of interest to an undeveloped corner of Edinburgh Park, a 43-acre business park masterplanned by American architect Richard Meier.

The shape of the new building takes inspiration from piles of rocks on the Fife coastline, the color of nearby Forth Bridge and the industrial heritage of the area. Once completed, Mach 1 will stand 15 meters (about 49 feet) high and stretch 50 meters (about 164 feet) at its longest point. Inside, visitors will find a coffee bar and double-height exhibition space used to showcase the Edinburgh Park masterplan through drawings, information boards and scale models.

The project’s developers and investors, Parabola, plan to use the space as a marketing office for the complex as well as a flexible event venue. Construction on Mach1 is set to begin early next year, while other new developments in the park, like a new public square, offices, shops, restaurants and sports and leisure facilities are in various stages of planning and construction.

““I was already working with Pangolin on a few ideas with shipping containers when this opportunity came up,” says Mach in an interview with Edinburgh News. “I seem to have become an accidental architect with this, which I’m sure architects will have something to say about. But it’s not a pretend thing – it’s a real piece of architecture.”

“Shipping containers are really interesting to me architecturally. They are really honest and are also really familiar to people. They also go all over the world. But this will be different to anything else that has been built of them before, which is what you really want as an artist.”

“We’re still working out whether every bit of it will be from real shipping containers, but it will have to look as if they are all real containers and it will be very strong. You should be able to drive a tank over it. I think people will look at it and think they have seen it before, like a king of Inca thing you’d find hacking your way through the jungle.”

The leap from sculpture to architecture might seem unexpected, but this isn’t the first time Mach has experimented with shipping containers. Previously, the artist has incorporated them into sculptures like Sydney’s “It Take Two” and “The Temple at Tyre.”

Taking advantage of the affordability, accessibility and modularity of shipping containers, these architectural projects envision radical new ways to expand houses, elevate slums off the streets, occupy disused industrial sites or just make it easy to insert both a hot tub and swimming pool into your backyard with minimal effort.

Sliced Shipping Container Home by LOT-EK

Sliced and reassembled shipping containers create an angular home rising from street level in Williamsburg, Brooklyn as if wedged into the ground. Containtertecture firm LOT-EK retained the recognizable form of the crates, but eliminated their boxiness, reassembling them in a way that produces a spacious interior and a series of terraced outdoor spaces on the sloping roof.

Beat Box Apartment Complex by Arkitema Architects

The Danish neighborhood of Musicon, located adjacent to the Roskilde Festival area, could get 30 new apartments in a complex made of 48 shipping containers called ‘Beat Box.’ The neighborhood aims to add 1,000 jobs and 1,000 homes over the next 15 years, with a focus on sustainability. “Beat box is a fun and challenging project,” say the architects. “We are working within the very specific and set shapes of the container but are still able to transform them into something different and new. By preserving every containers exterior appearance, and placing them on the concrete base and the significant steel structures, we are providing Musicon with a whole new and authentic residential building.”

Rooftop Shipping Containers Expand Korean Home

Two shipping containers sliced into each other in a cross shape add extra space to an existing home in Korea. Multidisciplinary firm Starsis maximized natural light in the structure with their placement of the windows and created some new rooftop terraces adjacent to the containers. It definitely seems like one of the easiest ways to expand a structure.

URBANTAINER Expansion for the National Theater Company of Korea

Shipping crates create a modular metal expansion called ‘Urbantainer’ for the National Theater Company of Korea’s main building, adding space for a lobby, communal lounge, bar and cafe while remaining in balance with the main building.The crates were inserted into the main shell to maintain a column-free internal space capable of hosting large groups of people; moving partition walls close or open various areas to allow the space to become one big theater.

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Try To Contain Yourself 12 Shipping Container Projects Play With Modularity

Since shipping containers are made to be stacked, that’s how they’re usually arranged when reclaimed for architectural projects. It just makes sense, right? They fit together in a certain way. But architecture firm Whitaker Studio just smashed that convention in spectacular fashion with one of the most bonkers shipping container projects we’ve ever seen, and the results are as beautiful as they are unusual.

Rising from the rocky Joshua Tree desert in California like a rare flower, this all-white residence is laid out in a starburst shape with several shipping containers pivoted up toward the sky. Each container is capped with glass and oriented to take advantage of a certain view, whether of the sky, the distant mountains, or the adjacent boulders.

Each individual container either serves as a small room for the interior, or as a giant skylight bringing natural light into the core. Dining tables and beds can be spotted through the glass from outside, wedged into the narrow spaces. In some areas, several containers are combined with their walls removed to create larger rooms. The layout is hard to determine from the exterior, but once you see images of the 2,150-square-foot interior, it makes more sense.

Though these renderings are pretty convincing, construction on the Joshua Tree residence is not set to start until 2018 on a 90-acre plot owned by a film producer. Architect and studio founder James Whitaker told ArchDaily that the client and his friends were visiting the plot of land, imagining what should be placed there, when someone pulled out their laptop and showed the group an image of a structure he’d designed several years prior, but that had never been built.

The containers are arranged to fit within the topography of the site, angled wider in some areas to accommodate the hills and rocks, creating sheltered outdoor areas for decks and hot tubs. The site is set on a natural gully created by stormwater, so the containers are raised off the ground, allowing water to pass underneath.

When glimpsed from above, this stack of vivid orange shipping containers on a Brooklyn rooftop looks like an add-on structure, but it doesn’t end where the original house’s roof begins. It continues straight through the building, all the way to the ground floor, creating a sort of house-within-a-house to subdivide the space in dynamic new ways. The four reclaimed crates that can be seen from higher floors of neighboring buildings are just the penthouse portion, which opens onto a connected rooftop patio.

Designed by LOT-EK, the crate creation reinvigorates the 1930s carriage house, separating the kitchen from the living area on the ground floor and acting as a staircase and room divider on the second level. The containers are cut diagonally to let light pierce through the home from the front to the back.

Placement directly in the center of the building effectively slices the living space into thirds, creating new rooms, like the master bedroom in the back of the intermediate level and the children’s room in the front. On the penthouse level, the same diagonal slices that can be seen below are filled in with glass to frame views of the treetops and other buildings on the block.

When standing at street level, you can just barely see the corrugated orange metal sticking up beyond the matte black facade of the home, but the neon color and diagonal lines of the crates are definite attention-grabbers through the glass garage door.

Check out 9 more architectural shipping container creations by LOT-EK.

This hexagonal floating student housing complex made of stacked reclaimed shipping containers is better than any dorm you could hope to live in. ‘Urban Rigger’ by Bjarke Ingels (BIG) creates a sustainable solution to the pressing need for additional accommodations for students in the city, providing 15 living spaces arranged around an internal courtyard. Completely carbon-neutral, the structures are solar-powered and make use of hydro source heating and low-energy pumps, and the first unit opened to the public on September 21st.

Each apartment is available to college students at $600 per month and includes a private bedroom, bathroom and kitchen. Occupants get access to the courtyard as well as a kayak landing, bathing platform, barbecue area and roof terrace. The pontoon basement features storage zones and fully automated laundry. It’s a pretty sweet deal for students, who get to gaze out of giant windows at the sunset every evening and enjoy a water-centric lifestyle that most adults only dream about.

Making use of the harbor ensures that students get to live close to the school, instead of far outside the city, where most affordable units are located. Eventually, BIG plans to create entire communities made up of multiple structures.

“There are few strategies that allow cities to expand,” the architects explain. “Yet, Copenhagen’s harbor remains an underutilized and underdeveloped area at the heart of the city. By introducing a building typology optimized for harbor cities we can introduce a housing solution that will keep students at the heart of the city.”

“Meanwhile, the standardized container system has been developed to allow goods to be transported by road, water or air, to anywhere in the world in a complex network of operators at a very low cots. By making use of the standard container system we are offered the framework of extremely flexible building typology.”

“By stacking 9 container units in a circle, we can create 15 studio residences which frame a centralized winter garden; this is used as a common meeting place for students. The housing is also buoyant, like a boat, so that can be replicated in other harbor cities where affordable housing is needed, but space is limited.”