Shipping containers stack up in Brooklyn
Spend enough time around marine docks, warehouses, or intermodal ramps, and you can get bored by the sight of shipping containers. To most supply chain pros, the giant steel boxes are simply utilitarian tools.
But designers with an architecture firm called Lot-Ek see them as something else entirely: building blocks for architecture. The firm specializes in the "adaptive reuse" (upcycling) of industrial objects like 40-foot ocean containers, which it literally cuts, opens, and unfolds to create highly conceptual buildings and other complex structures. To date, Lot-Ek, which is based in New York and Naples, Italy, has incorporated the boxes into projects all over the world. Examples include the Qiyun Mountain Camp in Huangshan, China; the APAP art school in Anyang, Korea; a multifunctional building in Staten Island, New York; and an architecture school in Aarhus, Denmark.
For its latest project, the firm has teamed up with JR, a French street artist known for installing large-scale murals in public spaces … occasionally without the permission of property owners or law enforcement. For this installation, known as "Triangle STACK #2," Lot-Ek designed a mazelike structure using 16 stacked shipping containers. The 60-foot-high temporary structure supports an "urban-scale" JR mural called "The Chronicles of New York City," a collage of photographs of more than 1,000 New Yorkers whose personal stories have been collected in companion app.
The art installation is situated in Domino Park, the former site of a Domino Sugar factory in Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighborhood. The site is around the corner from the Brooklyn Museum, which is hosting a collection of JR's murals, photographs, videos, films, and dioramas through May 3.
And if you can't get to New York anytime soon, don't worry; the structure is all over social media.