Container Architectures

The container, The Box that has changed the world, as Marc Levinson has defined it in his book, it's just a metal box, without soul. How to transform it in architecture? The "Magic Box" perimeter an empty space, has an high structural resilience, is self-supporting, if used is very cheap compared to other building systems, these the ingredients of the winning formula that makes the container the protagonist of the architectural successful stories presented in this issue. It can be converted to many possible uses: houses, emergency housing units, offices, cinemas, and restaurants. Fantasy is the only limit. On the other hand, every coin has two sides. Abandoned containers are a cost, a clutter, they have to be "recycled", better if recycling becomes business. And so the nightmare of "the builders" is back, which in the last seventy years have destroyed the landscape and created one of the most desolating and unsustainable anthropic environments in the history of mankind. In the past year the cost of used containers is increased without apparent reason, construction companies realize containers pre-adapted to the housing market, "improvised" designers chum out buildings thinking that to put containers one above the other - or side by side - is enough to "make architecture" ignoring, in their deaf pace, two centuries of scientific achievements in architecture and urban planning. I think that one of the most interesting aspects of the reuse of containers in architecture is precisely the freedom of approach with which each deals with the design. Nothing is codified, everything has to be rewritten from scratch every time, inventing new ways of interpreting the space. A territory in which even the young architects - largely excluded from the design world as the result of corporate rules and mechanisms - can express themselves and create a stimulating professional practice, socially committed, outside the box.