The clothing company Aether’s retail store in San Francisco, part of the city’s Proxy development, is made out of three shipping containers.
Millions — perhaps tens of millions — of shipping containers are sitting empty at ports all over the world. And they’ve been a treasure trove for architects Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano.
“We found so many — it felt like something so ripe to pick, basically,” said Lignano. He and Tolla were in San Francisco recently for the opening of an art exhibition at Hosfelt Gallery focused on their use of shipping containers as building material and art project.
The Italian “starchitects” got into the shipping container building game in the 1990s, roughly a decade after these types of buildings first started appearing. (Shipping containers were invented in the mid-1950s, but the first reported instance of shipping containers being converted into housing was 1987.)