Thursday was our last day to finalise our designs. Our design was pretty much complete, so I started looking into some other examples of container homes to see what issues had emerged during construction, and after construction when the homes were occupied.
One of the issues I found was from the ‘Containers of Hope’ project in Costa Rica, by Benjamin Garcia Saxe. The designer had underestimated the amount of wind the site received, and as the container had no cladding it was very noisy inside. The solution they came up with was to plant vegetation to reduce the power of the wind hitting the container. This isn’t an option for our project as the containers would be moved around to various locations on the site, so I looked into other ways of preventing wind noise. One option was to clad the container with re-used wooden pallets. The pallets provide a barrier to the prevailing winds as well as providing insulation from the sun, helping the container to regulate a consistent temperature. One thing I liked about this idea was that it retains the containers identity, as the container would still be visible through the gaps in the pallets. However, there were a couple of issues that needed researching:
- How to fit the pallets to the container – if the pallets were screwed directly through the wall of the container it would provide a thermal bridge from the exterior to the interior, which could cause a problem with water ingress and condensation.
- Whether the pallets would reduce the containers ability to pack/fold away – as we had the sliding pod and fold-down decking, adding external cladding could complicate the mechanisms that facilitate these features. Cladding the sliding pod would be especially difficult and it would have led to the loss of internal space, which ultimately was the most important thing.
Another issue I found was from the ‘G-Pod’ by Dan Sparks. He realised late on in his design that the longer walls of the container were load bearing, so if you create an opening in one of these it has to be compensated for. We were creating openings in both sides of the container, one for the sliding pod on the rear elevation, and two on the front elevation (one for a window in the kitchen, and one for a large sliding double door). This complicated the structure, added costs and questioned the structural viability of what we were trying to achieve. However, with the addition of a structural support in both of the larger openings the container would be structurally sound.