So why are container homes worth knowing about?

My family and I were in Washington, D.C. doing the normal high school trip. While we were there, there were 20 energy-efficient homes in the 2011 Solar Decathlon. These homes were built by university architectural departments, engineering departments and national labs. They were very interesting, but several things bothered me. First, they were small. That is fine, but most of them appeared to be better vacation homes than primary residences. They would have been fine for a retired couple or young couples without children. Second, these homes were expensive. The cheapest was about $300,000 (no land or utilities).

My wife had worked with an architectural consulting firm and over the years met a number of architects. As I got to know them and we were invited to various exhibits, showing and tours, I became more and more interested in architecture. I read various books and liked Frank Lloyd Wright's designs the best because of their simplicity. He also employed the building materials that were available near his design sites. As a geologist, I appreciated the use of native stones and woods that went into the homes or buildings. Wright wanted to design homes for middle-income families in the US. He envisioned a community of these homes and called it Usonia.

The term Usonia was not coined by him. It was borrowed from Samuel Butler and used by Wright in 1927 to refer to those of the United States, as the term Americans was not representative at the time, because Mexico and Canada were part of North American. Thus, we were all Americans. Wright used the word to refer to a group of homes that he would design for middle-income families. The Usonian homes were typically small, single-story dwellings without a garage or much storage. They were often L-shaped to fit around a garden terrace on unusual and inexpensive sites. As I mentioned above, he constructed the homes with native materials. He made them with flat roofs and large cantilevered overhangs for passive solar heating and natural cooling, natural lighting with clerestory windows, and radiant-floor heating. A strong visual connection between the interior and exterior spaces is an important characteristic of all Usonian homes. The word carport was coined by Wright to describe an overhang for sheltering a parked vehicle.

I liked the concept, but his homes were expensive and those designed by the universities for the Solar Decathlon were also expensive. There had to be another solution. Then I ran across the "Container of Hope." aptly named by its designer Benjamin Garcia Saxe. He constructed this 1,100 square foot house out of two ubiquitous shipping containers for $40,000 (no land or utilities). I thought that this was the solution. This concept is not new in Europe, where they have numerous architects designing shipping containers structures all over Europe. However, here in Usonia, they are viewed as mobile trailers and excluded in many suburban developments across the United States.

So, I would like to change that.

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