This is one Rhode Island School of Design course that wants students to think inside the box – specifically a shipping container. Sixteen students working from a studio in Providence are searching for new ways to stack the containers to develop sustainable and economically feasible buildings.
Their ideas range from a portable art gallery easily shipped around the world to what could best be described as a glorified port-a-potty.
“It’s a case of thinking widely inside the box,” is how co-instructor Peter Dean puts it.
The design studio, called “Re-box,” received its start when RISD faculty went searching for a real-life project that could serve as a starting point for student research. The faculty found Peter Gill Case and Joe Haskett, both RISD graduates, who designed and built a Providence office building out of shipping containers. RISD faculty seized on the idea and wrote a course curriculum to challenge students to re-envision shipping containers.
Co-instructor Markus Berger said the class charges students to rethink, reanalyze, revise and re-appreciate the containers that carry goods around the globe.
Students must also think a little outside the box. Berger said students must consider how their proposals fit into a wider community setting and who exactly their clients and financial backers would be.
To provide insight on the latter two questions, the college partnered with the Rhode Island Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Brown University. The center has been running workshops for the students on creating business plans and sending consultants to talk with students. Together, the two institutions split evenly a $150,000 grant from the U.S. Small Business Administration to run the course.
“This collaboration between RISD and Brown has great potential to create jobs and provide affordable, sustainable housing,” said U.S. Sen. Jack Reed, who helped secure the money. “This partnership will leverage investments by RISD, Brown and the R.I. Economic Development Corporation to promote entrepreneurship and business development here in Rhode Island.”
They started by dreaming of ideas, then they moved to collaborating with their peers and will ultimately create formal plans, business plans and prototypes.
For graduate student Cheryle Cranbourne, her idea focused on possibly the least glamorous part of a building – the toilet. Cranbourne wants to turn a shipping container into a self-sustaining, maybe portable, restroom. Unlike traditional, portable toilets, her module would include real plumbing fixtures and a fashionable interior complete with a skylight or two.
Solar panels on the roof would allow “The Can” to operate independent of an electric grid. A rain-collection system would feed the sinks and a compost system would handle the waste.
The whole point, ironically, is to “make the restroom less of a box,” Cranbourne said.
She’s also working with a classmate to combine their ideas. Her classmate has suggested using shipping containers to grow plants.
Perhaps, Cranbourne proposed, such a pod could be placed next to her bathroom. The container’s owner could operate a mini farm that would sell crops to pay for the bathroom facility.
The instructors encourage such collaborations. Though all 16 students started with a unique idea, their teachers expect they will consolidate them to about a dozen by the end of the course.
Indeed, the partnership between RISD and Brown’s entrepreneurship center is the first of its kind and a pilot. Helen Koh, a RISD administrator who helps oversee partnerships, said the college found in talking with students and recent graduates a need to offer more business training.
When Brown and RISD put in for the SBA grant, they pledged a project that would translate into real-life knowledge that could foster growth in the green-jobs sector. When they won the grant, the schools received 54 proposals from outside companies and organizations looking to offer a base research question.
A panel selected Case and Haskett, who have advised students on shipping-container construction and green-business models.
Students and their instructors say such a building would be unique for Providence but people have long used shipping containers and their railroad-box cousins for everything from housing to backyard storage.
What makes them so attractive is their standard size. Virtually all shipping containers are 8 feet wide and most are 8 feet tall. They come in standard lengths, 20, 40 and 45 feet, that make them relatively easy to transport and stack together.
But their versatility comes with tradeoffs, as students are finding. Graduate student Kevin Crace sketched plans to build a low-cost, student art gallery inside a shipping container that could move from university to university. But finding a way to fit numerous pieces of art and keep visitors flowing has forced him to, yes, think outside the box.
Crace has proposed two doors that would lead to outdoor patios where larger pieces of art could be stored and visitors gather with a little more elbow space. •
