from the ground up - The Tyee

“As it all turns out, we were able to do it for $180 persquare foot,” he said.“I would easily stack this house up against any houseout there for $250 per square foot or more. So I’m assumingwe saved in the realm of $70 per square foot,mostly as a result of the reuse of these containers.”That works out to a 28 per cent savings, which isconsistent with the 25 per cent estimate provided byBarry Naef of the Intermodal Steel Building Unit(ISBU) Association.Dewey acknowledged that he spent an inordinateamount of time and money working out solutions tospecific design problems. The building envelope, forexample, required considerable attention.“When you put two containers together, there is thisinevitable quarter-inch gap. So we had to develop alibrary of little details that could prevent water anddrainage,” he said.“I’m sure I will be able to do these things much moreefficiently next time.”Public perception remains a challengeDewey has several new container-based constructionprojects in the works. He said they all face the samechallenges.Perception is the first. The most common containerbuildings are the thousands of workers’ camps scatteredacross the booming Arab states, along with asmall number of mining camps in remote locations.“They look a bit like concentration camps... That doesnot help overcome the perception problem,” he said.“Nine times out of ten people are wanting somethingcheaper... People call me and they say, ‘Oh, it’s a box,and it’s cheap,’” he complained.“There is money to be saved using shipping containers,”he said, “but the cost of the house is much morethan the cost of the used container.”Dewey does anticipate that once the form becomesmore widely accepted, complete homes will be manufacturedin low-wage regions and sold worldwide.“We’re not quite there yet, but there is the potentialfor these homes to become extremely affordable inpre-fab manufacturing,” he said.He designed a pre-fab workers housing complexcalled Modulute, which would have created 220small, self-contained suites. Whistler approved the$3 million project a couple years before the recentWinter Games, but the American vendor contractedto prefabricate the containers was unable to securefinancing during the 2008 recession.“It was an easily stackable configure that could havebeen removed and reinstalled somewhere else,”Dewey said. “It’s a bit of a shame. It would have beena real nice spotlight project during the Games.”For the time being, he said, the container concept iscatching on much more quickly in Europe. He citedAmsterdam’s Keetwonen project and London’s ContainerCity developments as examples. (See yesterday’sslide show for pictures of those projects.)“I guess there’s sort of a conservative mindset inNorth American culture,” Dewey chuckled. “We say,‘I’ve got to see it to believe it. And I’m not going tolook too hard to try to find it.’”“That’s why I think the designer is a really importantelement. There are lots of engineers and fabricatorswho can fabricate something low cost, easy to maintain,and durable. But if it’s not appealing, if it’s notan attractive thing for people to walk by, then it’s notgoing to work in an urban environment.”Unrealistic expectations about cost are the secondchallenge.8