The Sinister Brutalism of Shipping Container Architecture

+ Example of such a statewide legislation:

https://www.curbed.com/2019/7/1/20677502/oregon-yimby-single...

Reminds me of the Tesla tent assembly line.

Around here, you would try and classify your tiny dwelling as "transportable".

This means having it sitting on, rather than attached to, the ground, and having some "skids" on the piles.

Exactly. There was a Kirsten Dirksen video showing some cabins built on a piece of property that was zoned (I think) for mobile homes. Voila', they welded some big wheels on the bottom of the structures.

They still seemed poorly laid out with crummy bathrooms (in this case, no piped water and a terlet that was basically an indoor plastic porta-potty) but I did admire the law-skirting.

There can also be avoidance of property taxes in some states I believe.

There are definitely places where this works, which is what I think in part lead to the building of most tiny homes on a wheeled, towable chassis. Of course, that limits you though into building that class of tiny home, and I personally feel that smaller but more permanent tiny homes with a foundation/slab are still a very economical, usable and viable solution.

You're right though, I think the key to making this work without trying to get laws changed is finding the right combination of laws and solution/use case that remains within the regulations. This is definitely doable in certain locales and not in others. If I'm really going to make what I wanted to do work, I will have to find the right balance of factors.

I was so surprised when I started reading zoning rules for plots of land that I was looking at to build a tiny house - some had minimum home size requirements, others had explicitly outlawed the use of any such wheeled dwelling precisely to prevent people from doing what you said. Some of the larger plots of land that were quite inexpensive required a 2,000sqft and up dwelling to be built if they were purchased and used for residential purposes!

I love edge cases like these. I wonder if there's a collection of them somewhere.

I do like Oregon! Thanks for sharing this link, this is good to know.

Also, shipping containers have a lot in common with soda cans: they have been engineered to have adequate physical characteristics within the very constrained parameters they are expected to operate under, and once they are outside that box, well, they're as fragile as soda cans.

For instance, if you try to stack your shipping containers any way but "directly square on top of each other, bordered by other shipping containers", you need to start over from scratch. All of those fancy stacks with one container crossing or bridging another come with lots of additional structural engineering to create the impression of whimsy. Or if you cut a big hole in one side of a shipping container to create a nice big picture window, whoops, you've destroyed the integrity of the container. Or you try to stack too much weight in the center of the top of the container, and no, that doesn't work either because the weight is supposed to be transmitted through the corners and sides.

You don't need a plasma cutter. If you're patient and noise-tolerant, an angle grinder, reciprocating saw, or even a circular saw (with proper blades) will do the job.

If you do want to use a plasma cutter (which I admit would be a more pleasant way of doing the job), you can rent a good one for a couple of hundred bucks a week, or buy a crap one at Lowes or Home Depot for $200-300.

You can both insulate shipping containers and cut windows into them.

I think the issue is that people don't trust themselves to build a wooden box with adequate structural integrity.

Shipping containers on the other hand are cheap, easily available and proven.

I'll also throw in the fact that even for some reason you wanted metal, we've also solved the 'make a metal building wherever you want it' fairly well too. It is designed for adding doors, windows, comes in a kit form, and also breathes and can be insulated to have pleasant thermal properties. Even just in $/sqft having rechecked on this idea the price was never so much better than other kinds of buildings that are more suited to be in livable spaces.

Really what I would have wanted to see is people handling disposal of containers and then using the broken down materials to build a structure and/or just being smarter about reclaiming the material, but I haven't seen that come up in passively looking into it.