San Jose Mercury News: Thinking inside the box
By Holly Hayes - 9.20.08
On Monday, if you happen to find yourself on Interstate 880 between San Jose and Alameda, look closely at the payload on the semitrailers whizzing by, heading south. Several of those trucks will be carrying pieces of a unique house that will be put together, a little like Legos, on the floor of the San Jose McEnery Convention Center. The structure, dubbed Harbinger House, has been designed out of recycled steel shipping containers — those ubiquitous boxy cargo holders that regularly travel the globe on trucks, trains and ships. The contemporary, two-bedroom, two-bath house will be the centerpiece of next week's three-day West Coast Green, the nation's largest trade show on green construction. While most of the conference is designed for professionals, the public can attend next Saturday and not only tour the 1,700-square-foot, two-story structure but also visit more than 400 exhibitors showcasing an array of green materials and technology. Former Vice President Al "An Inconvenient Truth" Gore also is on the bill for next Saturday — he will share the stage with California Attorney General Jerry Brown across the street at the Civic Auditorium from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m. — but the allure of the innovative Harbinger House may steal a bit of Gore's thunder. Its builder is SG Blocks — the SG stands for "safe" and "green" — which is a partner with Con Global Industries, the largest container shipping operator in the United States. SG Blocks calls the re-using of the decommissioned containers "value-cycling," which it defines as "taking a product that has fulfilled a primary purpose and finding another use for it without spending significant new energy and resources to convert it to another use."
"This may be the most sustainably green way to build," says Bruce A. Russell, managing partner of SG Blocks, who recently offered a tour of the in-progress house as it was going together under a steel canopy at Con Global's massive container depot in Alameda. "These containers have a useful life of seven to 15 years in shipping, and then what? They can have another 50 or more years of a higher and better use." The standard container, known as a "high cube," is 40 feet long, 8 feet wide and nearly 10 feet tall. Each weighs 8,000 pounds. The Harbinger House uses five containers and parts of others for its spacious rooms. The design includes generous balconies and terraces with folding glass walls that bring the outside in, and for the West Coast Green show, there also will be an outdoor kitchen and a garden of native plants. Inside, the decor will feature bamboo and reclaimed wood flooring, bamboo cabinets and recycled glass tile, among other green materials. Karen Jackson, chief innovation officer and program director for West Coast Green, says visitors also will see some cutting-edge technology, such as a monitor made by Agilewaves that continuously measures the house's utility consumption, calculates its carbon footprint in real-time and makes the information available on a wall-mounted touchscreen or Web page. "It's like when you're driving in your Prius and you see what mileage you're getting right on that little screen," Jackson says. Russell says the containers can be putty in the hands of creative architects. The Harbinger House has a modern profile that fits a California aesthetic, but "could you make it a Cape Cod? Sure. Some of the plans are very traditional and you could set them down in any neighborhood. You could use these containers to build just about anything." And SG Blocks plans to. The company is in the process of getting permits to build a large, multistory senior living complex in Oceanside on the grounds of historic Mission San Luis Rey. The artist's rendering of the project, which will be made of shipping containers, has the familiar look of white-stucco-and-tile-roof Mission architecture. Visitors to Harbinger House might not guess what gives the sleek structure its bones.