Container House
CATEGORY: Architecture (Design - Graduate)
LOCATION: Torrance, CA
TYPE: Residential (Major Remodel + Addition)
PROGRAM: Single Family
HEIGHT: 2 stories; 20 feet
AREA: 2,700 sf
DURATION: 2 months
DESCRIPTION:
Located in Torrance, California– a mixed industrial-residential community designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. during the early 1900s as “The Modern Industrial City”– the design for this project sits on a residential island in a sea of heavy industrial factories and businesses that was historically developed as a residential district for Mexican laborers who worked at Columbia Steel and Pacific Electric Railway. Unlike the mostly single-family residences which sprawled throughout Torrance during the mid 20th century taking up valuable land while raising the cost of living today, this project seeks to re-establish the essential role of architects in society by not only providing socially-oriented multi-family housing, but also by designing creative solutions for improving living environments in the 21st century.
The design takes a single-family residence in Torrance and proposes an innovative solution for how it can serve as the foundation for future multi-family affordable housing. Using the local history and surrounding context as inspiration, the design utilizes an adaptable structural framing system and service cores which run from the ground-level single-family residence up several levels supporting various configurations of industrially-manufactured housing units.
This innovative framework allows single-and-double layered shipping containers to be assembled into studios, 1-bedroom, and 2-bedroom units that overlook the adjacent green space while the service cores free up valuable space in the units by housing all of the essential services (bathrooms, kitchens, ventilation shafts, etc). A thick adobe skin encloses the ground-level residence while a full-height wooden screen wraps the entire building to provide privacy, shading and a unifying appearance to the different building elements. Both the adobe skin and wood screen reference the historical construction methods and materials used by the Native Americans who lived in the area for thousands of years.
Ultimately, this design reinterprets Torrance as “The Modern Industrial City” by proposing a framework that re-establishes the essential role of architects in society who have a responsibility to provide fundamental human shelter and meet the challenge of designing creative solutions for improving living environments in this century.