We are joined by Douglas Hecker and Martha Skinner of the SEED Container Housing Project of Clemson University. Douglas and Martha are professors of architecture and the lead coordinators for the SEED Project, an initiative to use shipping containers as a mechanism for community and economic development, especially in cases of disaster.
Topics of discussion in this interview include the project’s achievements to date, the economics of modification, the rationale of using shipping containers as housing, the mechanics of modifying the containers, and the role of the container in the community.
Clemson Seed Container Housing Project
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5 responses to “Episode #88: The Seed Container Project”
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Great work with the containers. I would live in one. But we need to get those prototypes on the ground and out of the theoretical realm! Once you deploy them, then that’s when the real research starts.
Fun idea. Thanks for asking about the price tag, Frank. A steel shipping container is probably too valuable to leave in a disaster zone, be it the US or Haiti. There would be enormous pressure to resell or scrap it — it’s worth many months if not years in wages. Consider the anxiety of living in such a hot item. Even plastic tarps and water bottles are under pressure from recyclers. All it takes is an afternoon with a torch to cut it up.
Maybe instead use bamboo, thatch, tile, blocks, very light gauge corrugated steel? Sandbags, earthbags! All the metal and plastic “life-support” innards of such a SEED container would also be subject to theft, resale, and scrapping unless they could be made truly superabundant. In Detroit or New Orleans or Port-au-Prince, mostly going to scrap in under five years… maybe a few to rich art collectors. Yikes!
AT, maybe, and I definitely think we might want to rethink the desire to turn these into housing. But if they could be used to make very well designed mushroom labs/fabrication modules/hydroponic, I bet we could even modify them for aquaponics. We could load the containers up with practical things, lot’s of open farm tech. The trick is getting people to learn how to use this stuff, and then use the natural and human capital (e.g seeds, mycelium, plows) to build up and out.
If the containers existed as a catalyst for economic rehabilitation and food sovereignty, why wouldn’t people want to keep them around? I think this is both technically and socially feasible. The politics of it is pretty ugly, though.
Frank,
You have been mislead by these faculty members. The catalyst for this project came from a different faculty member, Pernille Christensen, who was the actual Principal Investigator on this project (you can check the EPA website for confirmation of this). Through her contacts at Container-It, Inc. the project idea was developed…. she invited Doug and Martha to participate in the project. All of the work that Martha and Doug spoke to you about – the sustainable agricultural strategies, the water filtration system, implementation strategies and emergency garden were all designed by the landscape architecture team who worked on this project. Doug and Martha are a scam – they only worked on the container openings! Pernille Christense wrote the application for the EPA P3 grant application (the team won and was awarded a PHASE II grant but chose to decline funding because of the conduct of Doug and Martha). I think it is only fair that the whole team get acknowledged… I was a student in this studio so I am very familiar with it. All of this can be verified if you go to the videos on our website at seedcontainerhousing.net
Sincerely, a former student of Doug Hecker