With Intermodal Shipping Container Small Steel Buildings, Paul Sawyer has written the first book dedicated to building with shipping containers and it includes examples of a number of different buildings you can create using this modular architecture.

Michelle Kaufman has worked with renowned architects Frank Gehry and Michael Graves. In prefab green, architect Michelle Kaufmann shares her vision of creating thoughtful sustainable designs for everyone. Her firm, Michelle Kaufmann Designs, blends sustainable home layouts, eco-friendly materials, and low-energy options to create a “prepackaged” green solution to home design. Kaufmann tells about five eco-principles that are present in every design her firm creates-smart design, eco-materials, energy efficiency, water conservation, and healthy environment-and how they work together to create homes that make a difference. This will surely provide some excellent knowledge to help us get the project LEED certified.

I look forward to receiving these resources so that I can learn some of the finer details needed to make this project successful. I already know I am up against some difficult engineering work in order to make this work in the extreme climates of Winnipeg.

This company brings them in mainly from Toronto. At first, the idea of bringing containers in from a couple of thousand miles away worried me because it would go against the low carbon footprint of the green concept and we are looking to get this building LEED Certified. However, when one of these containers is ordered the shipping company gets it packed full to bring goods to Winnipeg. Therefore, the purpose of the shipping container remains as a shipping container right up until it gets to Winnipeg and then it gets retired. Once it is retired, it is now a locally sourced item, which is an important factor to the green concept.

Once we knew that we had a source for the containers, I figured I should play around with something closer to the real thing than just the simply computer model I have. So where else to turn but to LEGO. Yes, I built a LEGO model of the house, starting with 4 individual containers. This will help me to understand how it would need to be modified to maintain the structural integrity and eventually the thermal integrity.