Brooklyn-born and bred art cooperative United Photo Industries have a treat in store for any and all photography enthusiasts who happen to find themselves in New York between June 22nd and July 1st. In partnership with many different galleries, vendors and national institutions, United Photo Industries is putting together a photographic village it’s calling Photoville — and it’ll be made almost entirely out of shipping containers.

The project’s ultimate goal is to help “create an extraordinary global community of artists,” and they’re hoping to achieve this by bringing as many of those artists together as they can with exhibits in shipping containers.

20 foot full side access shipping containers in RAL5010 blue with floor mounted lashing rings

New 20′ high cube (9’6″) shipping containers RAL 6028 green with lock box and 10 vents currently arriving in UK depots

New 20′ shipping containers in blue & green and used wind and watertight 20′ shipping containers always available in all UK depot locations. 

Contact us for further information and current prices – sales@gvct.co.uk or Tel. 01753 480420.

The sporting goods brand has created a new campaign, The Sport of Fitness Has Arrived, that spotlights its partnership with CrossFit, a strength and conditioning program with a rabid cult following.

At a recent event in New York City, Reebok unveiled a new TV spot from the campaign that will also include print, digital and event-based marketing such as a YouTube takover and events in select cities around the world that encourage consumers to try CrossFit.

More than 400 Reebok employees a week complete CrossFit’s signature WOD (workout of the day) at Reebok’s facility in Canton, Massachusetts. Globally, nearly 1,000 Reebok employees practice CrossFit.

As part of its partnership with CrossFit, which was inked last May, Reebok has become the title sponsor of the Reebok CrossFit Games, which crowns the fittest man and woman on earth, and a dual logo graces the CrossFit containers in which participants perform their workouts; some of which were supplied by Grand View Container Trading as seen in the TV advertisement.

The Ideal X - The World's First Container Ship

The first container ship was the brainchild of North Carolina businessman Malcolm McLean, who bought a second-hand truck in 1934 and built it into a fleet of nearly 1,800 trucks, the largest in the South and the fifth-largest in the nation. As early as 1937, he’d noted the wasted time of break-bulk cargo handling, with longshoremen or stevedores laboriously loading individual items like sacks of coffee or nets full of cotton bales.

He thought it would make much more sense to lift whole truck trailers on and off the ship. And he wanted to save taxes as well as time. Sending truck trailers by ship from one domestic port to another would avoid the state fees imposed for excess weight as a truck passed through a dozen or more states.

The Seatrain shipping line had carried railroad box cars on deck as early as 1929 on the New York–to–Cuba run. But McLean envisioned ships dedicated entirely to the new loading system. He wanted to separate the truck container from its bed and wheels, and he conceived an angled-corner-post system to allow easy stacking and hold the containers in place.

So, he sold his trucking business and bought Pan-Atlantic Tanker Co. renaming it Sea-Land Shipping and beta-tested his idea with the Ideal X. McLean’s gamble was closely watched, and by the time the ship arrived in Houston five days later, there was already space booked on it to ship containers north.

The cost savings began immediately, and they increased despite increased costs as ports needed to retool and install new, jumbo cranes, but more and more began to do so as they saw other containerized ports increase traffic. The shipping container was born. Ships were built to contain nothing but containers, above deck and below.

Containers were soon standardized to make the system global at 8 feet wide, either 20 or 40 feet long, with heights of 8, 8½ or 9½ feet. Today, approximately 90% of global cargo is now carried by container, with motor vehicles being the biggest exception, and the average cost of shipping a product overseas has fallen from 15% of retail to less than 1%.

Could Mclean have imagined that from inception to today, 56 years later, there would be more than 530 million containers in the world!!

The front of the pizzeria is an open kitchen, set behind a glass curtain, with the idea that passers-by and customers can watch their pizza being made from scratch. Beyond the kitchen and counter area of the restaurant is a double-height dining room on the second floor mezzanine which overlooks the kitchen. The dining room is lined from end to end with shipping containers and packaging materials, forming each wall.

A bright red 20 foot  shipping container greets guests at the top of the stairs, with a shelf for a beverage display built into the side. Pale yellow and blue shipping containers section off other areas of the dining room, creating bathrooms, private dining and storage areas. Wooden packing crates have been joined together to make shelving for oils, napkins and spices.

Other shipping containers have been converted into shelving to hold the restaurant’s glasses and flat ware, easily accessible to the wait staff. Giant storage signs have also been hammered out to line walls, both downstairs and leading up the staircase with the entire interior being inspired by the harbour warehouses of New York City.

In today’s world there is need of building homes, which are tough and sturdy. Shipping containers can be reliably used as the foundation for such houses. Moreover, the best thing about shipping container houses is their portability and inexpensiveness. Recently, an architect named, Patrick Partouche came up with an idea of making a house with eight shipping containers within the countryside of Lille, France. The house is designed for single family use.

The most interesting aspect of the recycled shipping container house is its design and structure, which are both high tech. The construction was done by transporting containers through trucks and assembling them with cranes. It took three days for completing the whole setup. For the interior, the designer used industrial style, while not forgetting the use of quality material. The interior is stylized with checker plates, exposed conduit and metro wire, and it blends well with the exterior aesthetics of the container house. The architect has also used materials such as industrial lamps for lightning, old trunks for storage, handrail made out of wire,welded pipes and corrugated steel.

This house is a true reflection of how we can deal with durability and cost constraints of today’s world. It is symbolic of the new cult of innovative architecture, which employs the reuse of sources like shipping containers, without putting much strain over scarce resources.

This is exactly what a couple have done in San Francisco in their 127 foot loft. The industrialized apartment was complemented nicely by the addition of two shipping containers that are used as the home’s guest bedroom and home office as these photos show.

On paper, a giant dormitory built off site, out of environmentally friendly shipping containers sounds great. The project saves vast amounts of both time and money, and limits the impact on the local community. The question that was asked at the time was, “what are we subjecting our students to by forcing them to live in a used, but nicely modified, shipping container?” The first image that comes to mind is that the containers will be backing hot in the summer, freezing cold in the winter, and with the student opening and closing 8’6” steel doors every time they need to go out.

The dormitories are very different from this. Every room in the dormitory has a private bathroom, balcony, kitchen, separate sleeping and study areas, and large windows that provide a great amount of daylight. The heating is supplied by a centralized natural gas boiler and for added security; each dorm room is equipped with a central phone connected to the main entrance.

The dormitories have incorporated environmentally friendly systems in their design. One of which is an integrated water collection facility whereby the roof of the facility is designed to collect and disperse rain water that serves as insulation for the building.

Shipping containers were used to showcase apparel brands at this year’s Bread & Butter Berlin (BBB). The containers were in an exclusive D.O.C.K (Department of Contemporary Keynotes) area where the limited floor space — always a problem at tradeshows — was utilized in an innovative way to maximize the number of exhibitors that could show their wares. The shipping containers were stacked on top of one another, in an industrial-looking setup that blended with the warehouse setting.

Bread & Butter is a well-known biannual tradeshow held in Berlin, Germany, that exhibits selected brands from across the world at the forefront of street and urban wear. The event attracts buyers and fashion enthusiasts globally to its Summer and Winter exhibits.

Though it seems like you can get Starbucks coffee just about anywhere, only one store near Seattle in the USA can serve it to you from inside of used shipping containers. This week construction of a Starbucks out of four used High cube shipping containers. It will also be the only store to be setup for walk-up and drive-thru only—no lounge will be constructed.

More than just a quirky idea, there are (at least) two practical reasons for this type of assembly. The first is that it will almost certainly reduce the cost of store construction. The owner of an architectural firm that has experience building with new and used shipping containers, stated that construction in residential applications usually cut costs by 20 per cent, and the amount of construction time by up to 40 per cent in certain applications.

The other reason is that since shipping containers are very portable, they may open up new business opportunities. A Starbucks spokesman gave the example that a store could be assembled form used shipping containers in temporarily available locations, and later be transported and reassembled elsewhere. It seems this might also be a good way to test new locations before investing larger sums of money on permanent structures.

How long before we see these Starbuck stores made from used shipping containers appearing around the UK at festivals and events?