While no cheaper than conventional new construction, however, container Sentry Box deliver dividends on the lifestyle side – if your idea of living well includes home-making in a prefabricated steel-sided compartment with a hip, here-today-gone-tomorrow feel about it.
Optional off-grid extras include solar arrays for electricity and hot water, which fit onto the roof. Electricity is stored in a battery array that, when charged, is good for up to five days of 12V DC, and runs efficient LED lighting and low-power appliances. Additionally, the units can be outfitted with a composting toilet, a log burner complete with back-burner and thermal store for hot water use, and a log-burning cooker.
The home featured in this article is the Brockloch Bothy, an off-grid holiday cottage in Scotland, but other projects by the company utilizing the same modular pod design can be viewed in the gallery, including another home and an activity center.
“It’s extremely temporary,” Mr. Halter believes. “All architecture is temporary. No building looks good after 25 years.” Architects should be designing “weathering buildings that embrace the idea of dismantling, temporality.” So you tire of your container housing after a few years? “You just melt it down.”
Then, starting in the 1990s, architects, artists and designers discovered them, and they became chic.
Proposals for snap-together houses, condos, schools and offices cobbled from these strong, simple Modular Home building-blocks of globalism suddenly popped up in magazines across the world.
