Container City - Trinity Buoy Wharf, London, UK
N 51° 30.464 E 000° 00.460
31U E 292350 N 5710534
Container City is the name given to a project that has created office, workshops and living spaces from shipping containers. Their modular constructions allows for versatility and quick, environmentally friendly construction.
Waymark Code: WMPWJH
Location: London, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 10/30/2015
Views: 3
The Trinity Buoy Wharf website tells us about Container City:
Container City
Early in the Trinity Buoy Wharf project we devised an innovative way of building affordable new workspace. Container City™ is a fully flexible modular system of using redundant shipping containers to create stylish and high quality, yet affordable, accommodation for a range of uses.
The prototypes, "Container City 1" and “Container City 2” were built at Trinity Buoy Wharf in 2000 and 2002, and since then a growing number of projects has been prefabricated in the Wharf's workshops, commissioned by a variety of local authorities, educational and health establishments and private companies. In 2005 the Fawood Children’s Centre in Stonebridge, North London, made of containers, was shortlisted for the coveted RIBA Stirling Prize.
USM’s headquarters at the Wharf occupy part of the largest and most recent Container City structure, “The Riverside Building”, made from 73 containers and providing 22 separate units on five floors, completed in September 2005.
This versatile modular system is an outstanding example of recycling in practice, cutting both building costs and construction times dramatically and, with its strong yet lightweight framework, keeping the need for environmentally damaging concrete foundations to a minimum.
Wikipedia has an article about Container City that advises:
Container City is the name given to two pieces of shipping container architecture in east London. It is principally a means of utilising standard forty-foot equivalent unit shipping containers, at the end of their life, to produce flexible accommodation and offices at low cost.
A number of buildings have been installed using this method, primarily in east London. The first (Container City I) was installed in 2001, in four days, and fitted out over five months, at Trinity Buoy Wharf, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. This was expanded with a second phase (Container City II) in 2002 and offices were constructed on the same site in the Riverside Building in 2005.
A similar technique was used in Container Learn, a 2001 project for Tower Hamlets College, providing twelve extra classrooms on a site with limited space and completed in the time between terms.
The name is a trademark of “Urban Space Management”. The company have now completed sixteen projects utilising the technique, which is suited to short and medium term land use – when the land becomes required for other uses, the containers can be reused elsewhere.