Even before the groundbreaking for The Box Office – a 10,000-square-foot office building to be built using disused metal shipping containers – three of the offices have been let. Along with the developer, Peter Gill Case’s Truth Box Architects, two other design team members – Stack Design Build and D&P Real Estate Advisors – have signed leases for space.
Case held a groundbreaking ceremony on Tuesday and plans to start building in July. The $1.8 million project is set to open in March 2010.
PBN: Could you tell me a little about the genesis of the project?
CASE: I’m an architect and a developer, and as a developer I had been looking at three projects in the next five years that were highly visible green buildings. It was to help promote green building design here in Providence.
The first project I was planning on doing was not this one, but given the economy I ended up deciding to downsize down to this project, which is a smaller project and made of shipping containers. Part of the concern was the economy and that it was a good time to take less risk. But also it seems to make sense in this economy to market oneself differently, to promote what’s most important. For me, that’s green building and doing green building affordably.
And containers provide that opportunity. They’re out there. They’re ubiquitous. They’re inexpensive. They are like building structures and they are ready to be used. So its one of those moments when you’re driving in your car and you see these things stacked up and they look like buildings – to me anyways, because I’m an architect – and one thing leads to another. Before we knew it, we were looking for precedents in other container projects around the world. And so we found a couple. Container City in London is probably the most famous, and it’s a mixed-use development with hundreds of units.
This will definitely be the first one in Providence. In this country people are using them occasionally in a house or to do something that’s portable. I don’t think that in this country there’s anything that’s portable and is a permanent structure. I haven’t found anything.
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PBN: Where do the containers come from and how much do they cost?
CASE: You get them from New Jersey, where it’s estimated that there are about 300,000 shipping containers that are on our shores and not doing anything. That’s in large part due to the trade deficit that we have experienced over time.
It begins by bringing them up from New Jersey. They cost between $1,500 and $2,000 each and bringing them here is a few hundred dollars each. And once they are here, you have to modify them, which is another step along the way. Before they have even got on the job site, they have had holes cut into them and columns [added]. They are painted and then they actually end up on a job site.
PBN: Ordinarily, it can get pretty hot inside one of these containers during the summer. What steps do you take to make them habitable?
CASE: Getting to the green attributes a little bit, the first and most important place where we decided to put our dollars was in the shell of the building with insulation. There are two kinds of insulation. One is a spray foam and that helps seal the building and act as a moisture barrier and it has a very high density. Then the next layer will be a batt insulation that will be on the interior of the walls. That provides this high R value and the two types of insulation combined act to help reduce the amount of heat that is transmitted from the exterior of the building to the interior. So inside, you have got sheetrock walls and carpet and it looks kind of like an office building. And it should behave and perform like a good energy efficient office building does.
The next thing we do is have an air-to-air heat pump, which is a very efficient, very small electric heating and cooling system. We decided – and our mechanical engineer calculated – that the more dollars we put into the building envelope, the less that we will have to spend on the systems.
PBN: As far as the overall shape of the building, could you tell me a little about deciding where to place the containers and putting them together?
CASE: There are two ways to answer that, one from a market perspective and one from a design perspective.
From a design perspective, each one of these containers actually acts as a beam. So part of the dramatic design we have, where we have these cantilevered containers hanging out over the rest of the block, is because that’s what regular containers can do. One-third of it can be unsupported and that makes for a pretty nifty look and those are meant to be conference rooms, those spaces.
From a marketing standpoint, we thought we should target small businesses, entrepreneurs and startups – the smaller space was the niche market that was not being filled here in the city. So, for example, a double wide, where you have two containers, is 640 square feet. That can be used for a startup and we’re leasing that for $1,000 a month or $250 a week.
We would like to have other companies like our company and the other companies that are moving into the space. We would like a cross pollination of ideas to occur in this project.
PBN: Could you further break down some of the green elements of the project?
CASE: It’s easy when we have this one liner – we have 32 shipping containers, 94 tons of steel that would just be sitting idly somewhere, eventually rusting. The phrase I like to use is “up-cycling.” We’re up-cycling these containers from a lesser use – a vacant use – to a productive use.
The second thing would be the investment that we put into the building envelope, the high-performance windows and high-performance doors. And the insulation. Then the lighting – we have this terrific lighting system that uses very little power, about 0.6 watts per square foot, and each light has a daylight sensor on it so it just shuts off when it gets enough daylight on it.
This is also an all-electric building with no fossil fuels coming in to the building. So we’re not getting all of our power from the grid, but from renewable energy sources.
We have green leases, where the tenants have economic incentives to maximize the green performance of the building overall. … If they follow the guidelines in the green lease they will be able to save on their own energy bill, but also help the building overall.
