48 new materials - Material ConneXion

Photo: Untitled, 2003 by Frank Breuer; Courtesy of Fiedler Contemporary
truck. With that task removed, shipping prices fell
dramatically. Such retailers as Wal-Mart and Ikea
are inconceivable without containerized shipping.
Toyota tracks engines from Japanese factories by
GPS and RFD so they arrive at Canadian assembly
lines to be installed almost down to the minute.
Critical as the boxes are to our economy, we see
them only rarely, at the edge of the water, the
airport, or the highway. When they make appearances
in movies and on TV, they tend to be associated
with the seamier side of trade. The boxes’
very ubiquity and hard-shelled uniformity make
them the perfect cover.
Only recently, for political and security reasons,
we have begun to notice the boxes. We worry
about who controls the ports and piers that load
and unload them.
But artists, photographers, and architects have
been noticing them for a while. Photographer
Edward Burtynsky sees the stacking and sorting
of boxes on the docks as an “unintentional architecture.”
In his images, shipping containers, piled
four or six high, combine a playful, kid’s-block
quality with the wear and grit of the real world.
They are symbols of the global economy, Legos
of the New Order.
Burtynsky says, “I began to see containers as conduits
for globalization. These are the things that
make it happen. … We all partake of [the global
economy] but rarely see it. We are normally disconnected
from it.”
A different approach to containers is that of
German photographer Frank Breuer, who studied
with Berndt and Hilla Becher.
Breuer, who taught at Harvard last year and has
shown his work at the Rocket Gallery in London,
the Feigen Gallery in New York and the Fiedler
Gallery in Cologne, spends a lot of time around
ports looking for arrangements that please him.
He is fascinated by the abstraction of the colors
and modular, scale-less quality of the boxes. He
looks for just the right stacks; Antwerp, he told
me, was an especially good port for his purposes.
Burtynsky, too, is drawn to the ports. His photos of
them “are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of
our modern existence; they search for a dialogue
Photo: © LOT-EK
between attraction and repulsion, seduction and
fear. We are drawn by desire—a chance at good
living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously
aware that the world is suffering for our success.”
The boxes represent trends in trade. In the U.S.
and Europe says Burtynsky, “Because of the trade
imbalance, there is a huge oversupply of empty
containers, so people try to figure out how to reuse
them. It costs too much to send them back
empty.”
3x3 CHK (Container Home Kit) by LOT-EK
For this reason, they have been salvaged for storage
spaces. Construction crews these days often
turn shipping boxes into their own crude architecture
for on-site offices and storage.
Over the last few years, architects have begun
highly publicized experiments with recycling the
containers in building. They have been used for
dwellings by the firm LOT/EK. Shigeru Ban, known
for paper and cardboard buildings, assembled
them into a huge temporary museum on the
Manhattan waterfront. In London, artists now
live and work in two dwelling complexes called
Container Cities—a good symbol of the extent to
which our lives have become inseparable from
these anonymous boxes.
IN THE MATERIAL WORLD
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