Short interview-style video (James Blakemore and another speaker) arguing for the advantages of using shipping containers as building materials: they are solid steel, highly durable, fire-resistant, pest-resistant, and can be insulated to avoid corrosion. The speakers describe multiple applications — tiny homes (260–400 sq ft), workforce housing modules that can be delivered quickly, movable medical clinics, and housing solutions for Native American tribes and flood-prone areas — and emphasize speed and cost advantages over traditional framing.
Chapters
I'm asked frequently, why containers? Well, I kind of want to say why not Structurally, they're about as sound a construction material as you can use. They're solid steel.
They can withstand hurricane force winds, tornado force winds. These things stand up to the harshest weather. They're built for that.
You are certainly not going to have any mice chewing through the walls.
Bugs aren't coming in.
It's fireproof. It's highly, highly durable.
Yeah, the cabinets might burn, the countertops, your furniture is going to burn, but the structure itself is going to remain.
Once we encase the steel walls in the insulating foam, moisture is kept away from the steel, so corrosion is not going to be a problem.
You can button this thing up to be a fortress.
The versatility of shipping containers is such that we can pretty much make anything people need.
One of the good things about using container is we don't have to disturb a lot of the earth.
We've been approached by the, by a number of Native American tribes to help them solve their housing problems. And you know, they've got very, very acute problems housing their people.
Some of these units have even been looked for in areas such as Louisiana and even the east coast where these can be put on stilts to get out of harm's way of flooding issues.
We've been asked to design, design a medical clinic that can be put together and taken apart in a matter of hours. And so the idea is that this clinic can be taken to where the need is set up, meets the need. And once the need in that area is met, we take it apart, put it on trucks and move it to the next site.
These are perfect for tiny homes. It's really a craze right now. And getting something anywhere from 260 to 400 square feet, the shipping container fits very well.
We've got a very innovative four unit workforce housing module that's designed and can be delivered in a matter of days.
These products will fit the bill for a lot of affordable housing buyers.
You'll frame a house, it's going to take two to three times as long as it will take for us to use containers. And the neat thing about it, framing a house using traditional construction technology is two to three times more expensive. Aside from the fact that they're so flexible, they're cheap. They're cheap because there's so many of them around. There's hundreds of thousands.
