Shipping Container History: Boxes to Buildings

Author: becky

May. 06, 2024

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Shipping Container History: Boxes to Buildings

Most people take the existence of shipping containers for granted. Yes, you occasionally see them stacked up at ports, but it’s easy to forget that almost every consumer product you use was probably moved via shipping containers.

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You only need to go back a few decades to find a time when there were no shipping containers and no inter-modal transport systems. The more recent past offers us the example of innovators who realized the potential of building homes and other structures with shipping containers.

Even if you aren’t a history buff, there is useful information to uncover here about how economic needs drove the size, shape, and proliferation of containers that you’re able to make use of today.

Here we’ll explore how shipping was done before containers were invented, how and who invented shipping containers, the impact they have had on globalization, and how they’ve quickly grown in popularity as construction elements.

The World Before Shipping Containers

For centuries, mankind has voyaged across the seas, taking not only themselves but food, cotton, treasure, and goods, the likes of which their own country had never seen before. Just think of the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and more recently the British!

How did they transport their goods around the world? They clearly shipped to other countries, but without any standardization, it was a slow and difficult process.

Goods would be stored at a port warehouse until a boat was available. When an empty vessel arrived, these goods would be transported from the warehouse to the side of the docked ship. Goods would typically be loaded into sacks, bales, crates and barrels, and then they would be loaded by hand onto the ship.

As you can imagine this was a very labor-intensive process. This process was known as breakbulk cargo. A typical ship would have around 200,000 pieces of cargo onboard.

Towards the latter part of the second industrial revolution (early 1900s), this lack of standardization was becoming a real issue, especially considering how prevalent trains had now become. Transferring cargo from ships to trains was extremely slow and caused major delays and blockages within many ports. Larger ships would take around a week to unload and then reload (Levinson, 2006: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger).

This was the only way to transport goods and for centuries this process remained unchanged.

The Incredible Vision of Malcolm McLean

There was a great need for a standardized method of transport, but for this to be realized, a whole host of industries needed aligning such as ships, trains, trucks, and port terminals. As you can imagine, it would require a lot of work and persuasion to make such a feat possible.

Many people around the world know the name Henry Ford yet Malcolm McLean is barely known at all. In just a few minutes, you’re going to understand why he was such an important contributor to the world.

Malcolm McLean was born in 1914 and grew up on a farm in North Carolina. After finishing school in 1931, he worked for several years to save up enough money to purchase a second-hand truck. In 1934, he launched his transport business. McLean soon scaled up his transport business and had five trucks running underneath him.

During a routine delivery of cotton bales in 1937, from North Carolina to New Jersey, McLean witnessed dockworkers loading and unloading cargo, which took hours upon hours. He contemplated what a waste of time and money this was.

From 1937 until the start of 1950, McLean focused on his transportation business, which had over 1,750 trucks and 37 transport terminals. In fact, it was the fifth-largest truck transportation business in the whole of America.

It was during this time period that several weight restrictions and levying fees were introduced to road transportation. It was not uncommon for McLean’s drivers to be fined for heavy loads of cargo.

McLean was now looking for a more efficient way to transport his clients’ cargo and was reminded of his experience in New Jersey back in 1937. This was when he had the idea of creating a standard-sized trailer that could be loaded onto boats in the volume of not one or two, like with his trucks, but in hundreds. He envisioned revolutionizing his transportation business by removing most of his trucks and using boats to transport the goods to strategically placed trucking hubs.

This would mean that trucks would only be used for short, intrastate deliveries, eliminating the weight restrictions and levying fees that had recently been introduced.

Intermodal Transport Shifts From Idea To Reality

McLean, convinced by his idea to create a standardized shipping trailer or container, sold his trucking business. In 1955, he took out a bank loan for $42 million. He used $7 million of this loan to purchase the established shipping company, Pan-Atlantic Steamship Company. Pan-Atlantic already had docking rights in many of the eastern port cities which McLean was targeting. Shortly after buying them, he renamed the company SeaLand Industries.

McLean worked with engineer Keith Tantlinger to design, refine, and test variations of the container and finally settled on a primitive form of what we know today as the shipping container. It was strong, standardized, stackable, easy to load and unload, and lockable, which made it theft-resistant.

If you’re curious, you can see some of McLean and Tantlinger’s original patents online (though they expired long ago): US3456967A, US3085707A, US2853968A.

So now McLean had his containers and the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle was designing ships that could hold the containers. He bought the oil tanker, Ideal X, and modified it to hold 58 of his newly designed containers, in addition to 15,000 tons of petroleum.

On April 26, 1956, Ideal X left New Jersey, heading for Houston. The success of his design was reinforced when the company was taking orders before the ship even docked in Houston to take goods back to New Jersey. This was mainly due to McLean being able to offer a 25% discount on the price of conventional cargo transportation at the time. Also, because the containers were lockable, it stopped goods from being stolen during transit.

Following the success of Ideal X’s maiden voyage, McLean ordered the first-ever ship specifically designed to carry containers: Gateway City.

Gateway City’s first voyage was in October 1957 and went from New Jersey to Miami. Incredibly, it only required two groups of dockworkers to unload and load the cargo. The cargo could be moved at a staggering 30 tons per hour, which was unheard of at the time.

Standardization of Containers

At this point, McLean was using 35-foot containers, different from the 20 and 40-foot containers which we see today.

However, there was still the issue of a lack of standardization with regard to the container’s size and corner fittings. This uniformity was needed so containers could be stacked efficiently. Additionally, trains, trucks, and other transport equipment required a standard-sized container so each method of transport could be built to a single size.

During the Vietnam War, the US government was looking for a way to ship goods more efficiently and was pushing for standardization. McLean’s SeaLand Industries was still using 35-foot containers, while industry rival Matson’s was using 24-foot containers. McLean agreed to release his patent of the revolutionary shipping container corner posts (vital to its strength and stacking) and several standards were agreed upon:

January 1968: ISO 668 defined the terminology, dimensions, and ratings.
July 1968: ISO 790 defined how containers should be identified (Replaced by ISO 6346).

As a result of these standards, we now have the 20-foot and 40-foot shipping containers, along with a few other less common sizes. In fact, 20-foot containers, called Twenty-foot Equivalent Units (TEUs), went on to become the industry standard for referencing cargo volume.

The Benefits Of Shipping Via Container

It took a mere ten years for the first international container ship voyage. In April 1966, SeaLand’s Fairland sailed from the US to the Netherlands with a whopping 236 containers on board.

From here, container ships saw a massive expansion, and in 1968, container ships had the capacity to carry around 1,000 TEUs, which was exceptionally large at the time. By 1970, SeaLand Industries had 36 container ships, twenty-seven thousand containers, and connections to more than 30 ports in America.

McLean eventually sold the company to R.J. Reynolds for $160 million. For more information on Malcolm McLean click here.

Many now claim that containers have been the single largest driver in globalization over the last sixty years.

The cost to ship cargo has dropped more than 90%.
In 1956, cargo cost $5.86 per ton to load, while now it only costs around $0.16 per ton.
In 1966, around 1% of countries had container ports, but this rose to 90% by 1983.
Malcolm McLean has been awarded “Man Of The Century” by the International Maritime Hall of Fame.

For more interesting data points about the adoption and popularity of cargo boxes, check out our Container Statistics article.

One interesting experiment into the spread of container shipping was the BBC Box. BBC, the British Broadcasting Company, used GPS technology to track a single container on its months-long voyage around the world in September of 2008. In total, it visited Europe, Asia, North and South America.

Pushback Against The Spread Of Container Shipping

Despite the incredible benefits offered by containerized shipment, not everyone was happy about it, and efforts were made to slow its spread around the world.

Traditionally, the process of loading cargo required lots of port workers to physically manhandle all of the goods into position. However, with containers, these workers were no longer required, which caused outrage with the dockside unions. During the early 1970s, many union workers went on strike, disrupting the shipping industry and shipping container’s rapid expansion.

However, due to the huge financial savings of containerized shipping, these union workers were paid severance agreements and shipping containers’ growth continued to skyrocket.

Why are there so many surplus containers?

We’ll cover some of the first people to come up with the idea of using containers for construction in a minute. First, we need to talk about why that was even an idea worth discussing.

In many western countries including the US, imports greatly exceed exports. These countries consume more than they produce, ignoring domestic shipments. And when this phenomenon occurs with regard to goods that are shipped via container, you often end up with a surplus of shipping containers in these countries. It’s sometimes cheaper to leave the container at its destination and buy a new one in Asia where most products are shipping from than it is to send an empty container back to Asia for reuse.

So, you might be wondering just how much of a shipping container surplus we’re talking about here. First, remember that container shipments in and out of ports are measured in TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units). This unit of measurement is equivalent to one standard 20-foot shipping container.

Let’s focus on just the United States for now, although similar statistics exist in many other western countries. The US Army Corps of Engineers Waterborne Commerce Statistics Center records container movements from US ports and is an excellent source of data. The below graph shows total US imports and exports via containers from 2011 to 2020. As you can see, the exports stay relatively flat over time while the imports continue to grow.

This graph shows that the trend is not new and is only getting more pronounced over time. And the difference between the exports and imports each year are containers that need to either be stacked and stored, introduced into the domestic shipping industry, shipped back overseas empty, or upcycled for some other use. So, while not all of these excess containers (around 14 million TEU’s in 2020, per the graph) are being stored at port facilities, the graph certainly indicates that there are an increasing number of empty containers that need to be transported somewhere else or reused in another way.

It’s also important to understand the subtleties of this data. It’s not measuring the value of what is being imported and exported, only the volume. In other words, this isn’t necessarily indicative of the health of a country’s economy or anything similar. After all, a country that imports pillows and exports diamonds would have a vastly different value (in dollars) versus volume (in TEUs) numbers.

If you’re interested in more detailed data for the US in particular, we have you covered. The graph below shows how the import vs export numbers (along with domestic uses of containers between these ports or to the interior of the country) vary by port, as of 2019. Almost every port shows an imbalance, with more imports than exports, just as we’d expect based on the chart above. This graphic comes from the Port Performance Freight Statistics Annual Report to Congress in 2020, made by the US Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

And if that’s not enough, check out the Bureau of Transportation Statistics Port Profile Dashboard Tool. This data dashboard lets you see tons of information, including TEU numbers, for dozens of US ports. There, you can probably see how the trade imbalance actually looks at the nearest port to where you live.

Now, some of you might be thinking, since we have such a big surplus of shipping containers in the US, could we not just recycle them into other steel products? The short answer is that it’s usually not very efficient to strip them of their non-metal materials then melt them down to steel. It’s equipment and labor-intensive just to get them cleaned up and cut into smaller pieces, then requires tons of energy to melt them down. For more information, read our in-depth article about the Sustainability of Containers.

Alternative Uses for Shipping Containers

If we look for the first official record of a shipping container home, we find a man named Phillip Clark. On Monday, November 23, 1987, Clark filed a patent called the “Method for converting one or more steel shipping containers into a habitable building”.

Within the patent, Clark outlines how shipping containers can be sited on a weight-bearing foundation to create a habitable building. He claimed that shipping containers make the perfect modular building material. He also commented that reused shipping containers can be used to make homes economically.

It took two years for the patent to be granted. On Tuesday, August 8, 1989, Clark was presented with his approved patent #US4854094A.

So where did Phillip Clark get his idea? Was he the first person ever to think that shipping containers could be used to build homes?

Far from it. Just two years before Clark’s patent was filed, shipping containers made their way onto the big screen. In 1985, in the film Space Rage, shipping containers were used to make numerous buildings on the production set.

We can go further back than that, to the 1970s, where UK architect Nicholas Lacey wrote his university thesis on the concept of reusing shipping containers and turning them into habitable dwellings.

He has since gone on to construct several of these shipping container buildings with Urban Space Management.

We can still find earlier examples of shipping containers being used as buildings, starting back in 1962.

On Friday, October 12, 1962, Insbrandtsen Company Inc. filed a patent titled “Combination shipping container and showcase”. Within this patent, Christopher Betjemann was listed as the inventor and it states that shipping containers can be used as an exhibition booth when companies are touring and showcasing their products.

Patent #US3182424A was granted on Tuesday, May 11, 1965. You can see the original patent here.

Going Mainstream

In 1994, Stewart Brand, an American writer, published a book titled “How Buildings Learn”. In it, Brand goes on to write ideas about how to convert shipping containers into office space. This was the first publication that mentions building with shipping containers.

From here, shipping container homes started to gain momentum and the first completed build we could find on record was the “The Simon’s Town High School Hostel”.

The project was conceived when Safmarine donated forty used shipping containers to Simon’s Town High School. The school wanted to use the containers to build a hostel that was capable of housing 120 people at any given time. The project cost a total of $227,000 and was ready for its first guests on November 30, 1998.

21st Century Shipping Container Homes

In 2006, Peter DeMaria, a Californian architect designed the first shipping container home in the US.

Known as the Redondo Beach House, the home was approved under the national Uniform Building Code (One of the predecessors of the IBC) and was completed in 2007. This was the first real shipping container home.

Since then we’ve seen shipping container homes popping up all over the world! Some of the more famous ones include:

Container Guest House (2010)

A single 40-foot container is used to build this container guest house. It has several unique features, but the most noticeable is the green roof!

View Details on the Container Guest House

Containers of Hope (2011)

Renowned for its incredible cost savings, Containers of Hope was built in Costa Rica for around $40,000. The home was built using parallel containers connected by a high-roofed space between, a building concept repeated

View Details on Containers of Hope

PV14 Container House (2014)

Proof that container homes don’t have to be small, the PV14 House used 14 shipping containers to create a sizable modern home in Dallas, Texas.

View Details on the PV14 Container House

The popularity of shipping container homes continues to rise and there appears to be no stopping these sustainable, affordable homes.

As shipping container home popularity continues to grow, we have seen many other amazing uses of shipping containers including restaurants, offices, and schools. Take a look at some of the other Shipping Container Case Studies for more cool examples.

Summary

It’s an interesting story that brought us these ubiquitous, nondescript boxes. Who knew that what we are now using to construct homes changed the world so much.

It’s unlikely that Malcolm McLean and his contemporaries could have foreseen the drastic changes they would cause in the world, nor the incredible examples of architecture that would result from their cargo-focused innovation.

Let us know which part of the history of containers most surprised you in the comments below!

Shipping container architecture

Buildings constructed using modules, like shipping containers

A first aid station built using an intermodal container. A remote office constructed with a used shipping container.

Stacked reefer container homes

Shipping container architecture is a form of architecture that uses steel intermodal containers (shipping containers) as the main structural element. It is also referred to as cargotecture or arkitainer, portmanteau words formed from "cargo" and "architecture". This form of architecture is often associated with the tiny-house movement as well as the sustainable living movement.

The use of containers as building materials has been growing in popularity due to their strength, wide availability, low cost, and eco-friendliness.[1][2]

Additional resources:
An Overall Guide: Choosing the Right Shipping Container

If you want to learn more, please visit our website High Quality Expandable House supplier.

Advantages
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Due to their shape and material, shipping containers have the ability to be customized in many different ways and can be modified to fit various purposes. Standardized dimensions and various interlocking mechanisms make these containers modular, allowing them to be easily combined into larger structures that follow modular design. This also simplifies any extensions to the structure as new containers can easily be added on to create larger structures. When empty, shipping containers can be stacked up to 12 units high.

Because shipping containers are designed to be stacked in high columns and to carry heavy loads, they are also strong and durable. They are designed to resist harsh environments, such as those on ocean-going vessels. Shipping containers conform to standard shipping sizes, which makes pre-fabricated modules easily transportable by ship, truck, or rail.

Shipping container construction is still less expensive than conventional construction, despite metal fabrication and welding being considered specialized labor (which usually increases construction costs). Unlike wood-frame construction, attachments must be welded or drilled to the outer skin, which is more time-consuming, and requires different job site equipment.

As a result of their widespread use, new and used shipping containers are available globally. This availability makes building tiny or container houses more affordable. Depending on the desired specifications and materials used, a container home will often cost less compared to a traditional house[3]

Shipping container construction requires fewer resources, meaning the quantity of traditional building materials needed (e.g. bricks and cement) are reduced. When upcycling shipping containers, thousands of kilograms of steel are saved. For example, a 12 metres (39 ft) long shipping container weighs over 3,500 kilograms (7,700 lb).

Disadvantages
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Containers used for human occupancy in an environment with extreme temperature variations will normally have to be better insulated than most brick, block, or wood structures because steel conducts heat very well. Humidity can also affect steel structures, so when moist interior air condenses against the steel, it becomes humid and forms rust if the steel is not sealed and insulated.

While in service, containers may be damaged by friction, handling collisions, and the force of heavy loads overhead during ship transits. Additionally, although the two ends of a container are extremely strong, the roof is not. In the case of a 20 feet (6.1 m)-long container, the roof is built and tested only to withstand a 300 kilograms (660 lb) load, applied to an area of 61 cm by 30.5 cm (2 ft by 1 ft) in the weakest part of the roof.[4] Companies inspect containers, and condemn them if they present cracked welds, twisted frames, or pin holes, among other faults.

Shipping containers possess the capacity to be organized into modular arrangements, thereby creating expansive structures. Nevertheless, deviating from the established standard dimensions, typically 20 feet (6.1 m) or 40 feet (12 m) in length, can engender inefficiencies in terms of both temporal and financial resources. Containers surpassing the 40 feet (12 m) length threshold may encounter challenges during navigation within residential vicinities.

The transportation and construction of shipping container structures can be expensive due to size and weight, and often require the use of cranes or forklifts. This is in contrast to more traditional construction materials like brick or lumber, which can be handled manually and used for construction even at elevated heights.

Obtaining building permits for shipping container homes can be troublesome in regions where municipalities are not familiar with shipping container architecture, because the use of steel for construction is usually for industrial rather than residential structures. In the United States, some shipping container homes have been built outside of various city zoning areas, where no building permits are required.

Chemicals
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To meet Australian government shipping quarantine requirements, most container floors are treated with insecticides containing copper (23–25%), chromium (38–45%) and arsenic (30–37%) when manufactured. Chromium and arsenic are known carcinogens. If shipping containers are repurposed for human habitation, these floors should be safely removed, disposed, and replaced. Because shipping containers can carry a wide variety of industrial cargo, spillages or contamination may also occur inside the container, and will have to be cleaned before habitation. Before human habitation, ideally all internal surfaces should be abrasive blasted to bare metal, and re-painted with a non-toxic paint system. Solvents released from paint, and sealants used in manufacture, might also be harmful to human health.

Examples
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Shipping containers stacked to form a semi-permanent wall at an iron ore mine in Western Australia

The use, size, location and appearance of structures based on shipping containers vary widely.

When futurist Stewart Brand needed a place to assemble the material he would use to write How Buildings Learn, he converted a shipping container into an office space in the early 1990s. The conversion process is described in How Buildings Learn itself.

Illustration of the structure of Container City showing how the containers are stacked.

In 2000, the firm Urban Space Management completed a project called Container City I in the Trinity Buoy Wharf area of London. The firm has gone on to complete additional container-based building projects, with more underway. In 2006, the Dutch company Tempohousing finished, in Amsterdam, the biggest container village in the world: 1,000 student homes from modified shipping containers from China.[5]

In 2002, standard ISO shipping containers began to be modified for use as stand-alone on-site wastewater treatment plants. This use of containers creates a cost-effective, modular, and customizable solution to on-site wastewater treatment, eliminating the need for construction of a separate building to house the treatment system.[6]

In 2006, Southern California Architect Peter DeMaria designed the first two-story shipping container home in the U.S., as an approved structural system under the strict guidelines of the nationally recognized Uniform Building Code (UBC). Named the Redondo Beach House, it inspired the creation of Logical Homes, a cargo container–based pre-fabricated home company. In 2007, Logical Homes created its flagship project, the Aegean, for the Computer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada.

In 2006, Village Underground constructed a series of not-for-profit artists' workspaces in Shoreditch, London. Developing the concept further, Auro Foxcroft constructed recycled shipping container architecture that incorporated retired London Underground carriages.

In 2007, entrepreneur Brian McCarthy developed prototypes of shipping container housing for maquiladora workers in Mexico.[7]

Application in the Live Event & Entertainment Industry
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In 2010, German architect and production designer Stefan Beese used six 12 metres (39 ft)-long shipping containers to create a large viewing deck and VIP lounge area for the Voodoo Music Experience, New Orleans, as a substitute for typical grand stand scaffolding. The containers double as storage space for other festival components throughout the year. The two top containers are cantilevered 2.7 metres (8.9 ft) on each side, creating two balconies that are prime viewing locations. Each container was perforated with cutouts spelling the word "VOODOO".

Grand Stand and VIP Lounge made from Shipping Containers for the 2009 and 2010 Voodoo Music Experiences, City Park, New Orleans.

In the United Kingdom, walls of containers filled with sand have been used as large sandbags to protect against flying debris from exploding ceramic insulators in electricity substations.

In October 2013, two barges owned by Google with superstructures made out of shipping containers received media attention amid speculation about their purpose.[8]

Markets
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Brisk trade in Bishkek's Dordoy Bazaar.

Empty shipping containers are commonly used as market stalls and warehouses in the countries of the former USSR.

The biggest shopping mall or organized market in Europe is made up of alleys formed by stacked containers, on 69 hectares (170 acres) of land, between the airport and the central part of Odesa, Ukraine. Informally named "Tolchok", and officially known as the Seventh-Kilometer Market, it has 16,000 vendors and employs 1,200 security guards and maintenance workers.

In Central Asia, the Dordoy Bazaar in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan is almost entirely composed of double-stacked containers. It is popular with travelers coming from Kazakhstan and Russia for the cheap prices and plethora of knock off designers.

In 2011, the Cashel Mall in Christchurch, New Zealand reopened in a series of shipping containers, months after it had been destroyed in the earthquake that devastated the city's central business district.[9] Starbucks Coffee has also built a store using shipping containers.[10] A pop-up shopping mall called Boxpark was also created in Shoreditch, London, in 2011, followed by other locations in the Greater London area.[11] A pop-up shopping mall, Common Ground, was created in Seoul, South Korea in 2016.[12]

Other Uses
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Shipping container as a roundabout artwork

Shipping containers have also been used as:

Alternative Housing & Architecture
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News report from Voice of America about shipping container housing for students in Copenhagen. Shipping container cottage. 20 foot reefer container home

The abundance and relative cheapness of these containers during the last decade comes from the deficit in manufactured goods coming from North America in the last two decades. These manufactured goods come to North America from Asia and, to a lesser extent, Europe, in containers that often have to be shipped back empty, or "deadhead", at considerable expense. It is often cheaper to buy new containers in Asia than to ship old ones back. Therefore, new applications are sought for the used containers that have reached their North American destination.

Containers have been utilized by architects and individuals to build diverse structures, including homes, offices, apartments, schools, dormitories, artists studios, and emergency shelters. Additionally, containers have found use as swimming pools and temporary secure spaces on construction sites and other venues.

CONEX containers were developed by Malcom McLean to standardize the intermodal shipping unit. CONEX containers may or may not meet the requirements of local building codes. As they are not field erected, a registered engineer or architect must verify that the containers comply with the structural requirements of the building code. The 2021 ICC[23] code was amended to address CONEX containers.

Phillip C. Clark filed for a United States patent on November 23, 1987, described as "Method for converting one or more steel shipping containers into a habitable building at a building site and the product thereof". This patent was granted August 8, 1989 as patent 4854094. The patent documentation shows what are possibly the earliest recorded plans for constructing shipping container housing and shelters by laying out some very basic architectural concepts. Regardless, the patent may not have represented novel invention at its time of filing. Paul Sawyers previously described extensive shipping container buildings used on the set of the 1985 film Space Rage Breakout on Prison Planet.

Other examples of earlier container architecture concepts include a 1977 report entitled "Shipping Containers as Structural Systems",[24] investigating the feasibility of using 20 feet (6.1 m) shipping containers as structural elements by the US military.

During the 1991 Gulf War, containers saw considerable nonstandard uses, not only as makeshift shelters, but also for housing of US soldiers. The shipping containers were equipped with air conditioning units and provided shelter as well as protection from artillery shelling.

It has been rumored that some shipping containers were used for transportation of Iraqi prisoners of war, with holes cut in the containers to allow for ventilation. Containers continue to be used for military shelters, often additionally fortified by adding sandbags to the side walls, to protect against weapons such as rocket-propelled grenades ("RPGs").

Media
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Shipping container architecture has inspired the reality television series Containables (DIY) and Container Homes (HGTV), in addition to being featured in episodes of Grand Designs (Channel 4) and Amazing Interiors (Netflix).

Shipping Container History: Boxes to Buildings