At a glance
The container gave students a chance to apply their plans to an actual, limited-space area.
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Architecture students in Design Studio 1 at Alfred State were able to actualize their plans for a housing-design project and gain hands-on experience thanks to A-Verdi Storage Containers, which let the students borrow a shipping container to use in their endeavor.
Architecture and Design Department Assistant Professor Terry Palmiter and Professor Richard Carlo tasked the students last month with designing a temporary living environment for a single family unit within the confines of a standard 20-foot shipping container. They were divided into 15 groups of three, with one student serving as the programmer, another as the client, and the third student as the designer.
The programmer interviewed the client, who created a hypothetical scenario based on what his or her future family would be like and what sort of housing that family would require if affected by a natural disaster. The programs were shuffled and handed out to a group member who would design a “house” based on the program he or she received.
Students then created real-scale household items out of cardboard, including a toilet, a tub, a refrigerator, and more. This, according to Carlo, allowed students to study human dimensions and the relationship to critical or essential residential living activities.
“The idea of making the cardboard items was so that they could just start to see the limits of what one container was like and maybe get a feel for the interaction of scale of standard objects based on human performance within a limited space like the container,” said Carlo.
The class was able to secure usage of the container because an uncle of one of Palmiter’s students, Robert Apgar, an architectural engineering technology major, from Waterloo, owns Savannah-based A-Verdi Storage Containers, the premier provider of storage and office solutions throughout New York State. After Apgar approached his uncle, Joe Verdi, about the possibility of letting the students borrow a container, Verdi complied.
The container gave students a chance to apply their plans to an actual, limited-space area.
“Normally, it’s just lines on a drawing,” said Alexandra DiMaria, a Bachelor of Architecture (BArch) major from Orchard Park. “You can imagine it and picture it but it’s nice to be actually in a space with life-sized objects to kind of see how you can change your design and move things around and how things would work out better, what constraints you have. It makes the assignment more real.”
Adrienne Drumm, a BArch major from Tully, said the project allowed the students to think about space a lot differently.
“In most of our projects, we have an unlimited amount of space, we just have to come up with a good idea, so you just kind of make these giant rooms and do whatever, but once you actually are forced to fit within a 10-by-20 container, you really have to think about how you’re going to fit everything you need in there without having to climb over a desk, basically,” Drumm said.
Carlo said, “I think part of the reason that we do this project with a container is, if you say, ‘Design a house,’ people tend to fix on the mental model of the house they grew up in and they mimic that. But when we say, ‘Design a living facility for this imaginary program that we’ve made and, by the way, it has to be in containers,’ they have to rethink the entire idea of what a house is.”
Pictured above are several Alfred State sophomore Bachelor of Architecture (BArch) students inside the container they utilized for a recent housing-design project. The students borrowed the container from A-Verdi Storage Containers out of Savannah.