from the ground up - The Tyee

Green and Affordable Homes, Out of the BoxShipping containers hold the potential to revolutionize urban housing.By Monte PaulsenArticle first published on April 12, 2010, by TheTyee.ca.Vancouver boasts both the “Greenest Neighbourhoodin the World” -- the LEED certified OlympicAthlete’s Village -- as well as the world’s firstLEED Platinum convention centre.But the city that calls itself the “Green Capital” hasshown surprisingly little interest in a rapidly emergingbuilding technology that promises to become not onlyfar more environmentally friendly but also significantlyless expensive than the heavy concrete constructionthat has reshaped the city’s skyline. Indeed, Canada’sfirst modern home built this way stands not in theTerminal City, but across the straight in Victoria.Over the next few days, The Tyee will report on howintermodal shipping containers -- those 40-foot steelboxes that flow through the region’s ports at the rateof more than two million a year -- are being refashionedinto affordable green buildings across Europeand Asia.And on Thursday evening, the Tyee Solutions Societywill join with Architecture For Humanity Vancouverand the Design Foundation of British Columbia tokick-off the Quick Homes Superchallenge, a two-partcharrette aimed at generating affordable housing conceptsfor public discussion.The box that changed the worldThe humble steel boxes in which goods are shipped,trained and trucked around the world touched off aneconomic “revolution,” according to Mark Levinson,author of The Box: How the Shipping ContainerMade the World Smaller and the World Economy Big-ABOVE: City Centre Lofts is slated to become the first midriseto be built out of shipping containers in North America.It will be constructed using 50 per cent recycled material.The Salt Lake City building was designed by architect AdamKalkin. The building’s footprint is about the same size as acommon 25- by 120-foot Vancouver Lot.ger.Levinson chronicles the 18 million big steel boxesthat make globalization possible, flooding marketswith low-cost consumer goods from China, filling citieswith cut-rate department stores such as Wal-Mart,and felling wide swaths of the North American manufacturingsector and the high-paying jobs it provided.“In 1956, the world was full of small manufacturersselling locally,” Levinson writes, “by the end of the1