Living in boxes

By Guy Marriage, May 29, 2006 @ midnight

The time is right for the prefab home

[Architecture]

The trend towards urban apartment living will continue in New Zealand as the boredom of suburbia becomes more apparent to the young, unencumbered singles and retired couples. But the demand for apartments is squeezed by a limit on available land and pinched by the rising cost of construction.

It’s a worldwide problem. For many years, old buildings were cheerfully demolished and replaced with highrise buildings. Later, any remaining warehouses were converted into apartments with delightfully battered and aged stone, brick, or timber features and ludicrously high entry fees. But we didn’t have many truly wonderful old warehouses to start with in New Zealand, and most that remain have already had the conversion treatment.

Happily, there is another way. Modular housing has long been touted as solving the world’s housing worries. The idea is now being seriously explored, with over 40 different systems developed across the world.

Wellington designer Rod Gibson recently converted a factory in China to construct a non-stop stream of prefabricated housing, based on the size of a standard shipping container. The habitable abode, called Habode, arrives by truck and, when unpacked, expands out like a butterfly. It becomes an 80 square metre apartment with a butterfly wing roof that belies its box origins.

“Bish bash bosh, a bit of how’s your father, and voila: instant home and, once services are connected, instant signoff by the local council.”

But where do you put your container home? It’s simple in the country: find a spare, flattish bit of land with access for a large truck, unload the container and unpack your home. Bish bash bosh, a bit of how’s your father, and voila: instant home and, once services are connected, instant signoff by the local council. But in the city it’s a different story. Cities already have buildings in place which may not suit the module of a standard 40-foot container plonked on the roof. Indeed, the building may not be able to take the load and the fire engineer may not be able to factor it into the escape route.

There’s also the multiplier factor: just how many containers homes do you want on the roof of your building? Werner Aisslinger, the German inventor of the tasty-looking Loft Cube, features just one unit in advertising for his modular home, perched on a roof edge in Berlin. It’s smart, it’s innovative, it has rounded edges to make it go faster. It’s gorgeous: I want one. But what if you want more than one? Won’t it lose its exclusivity factor? How do they, literally, stack up?

Success in modular housing here will probably go to the first company to design a modular framework where a standard container can be inserted at any floor, wherever it is needed. Ross Stevens, an industrial designer resident in the capital and a keen advocate for container housing, has persevered with local neighbours and city planners and come up with the goods in the depths of Happy Valley, where his home consists of four standard containers stacked to form a very unique house. It looks extremely industrial or beautifully slick and modern, depending on your viewpoint.

But, to go back to Gibson’s Habode, do you need to go to China to get them made? We already have a prefab building system second to none. The module building capital of New Zealand is, somewhat bizarrely, the Otago town of Oamaru, noted more for its whitestone Victorian buildings and local penguin roosting arena than the provision of classy bathrooms. But that, apparently, is what Oamaru does best. There is a modern module marvel: de Geest Construction builds bathroom and bedroom modules for projects including hotels and apartments in Wellington, Christchurch, Queensland, Queenstown and Auckland. You may already be a veteran of container living.

Guy Marriage is a Wellington architect and lectures at Victoria University’s School of Architecture