HyBrid Seattle is a firm involved in a wide spectrum of housing solutions from site built homes to cargo containers. It’s made up of a multi-disciplinary team of professionals with combined backgrounds in architecture, art, landscape architecture, and urban ecology.

And while quite a few developers are now involved in using shipping containers as livable spaces it was HyBrid Seattle that coined the term Cargotecture to describe their special application of the medium.

The firm has what amounts to a ready made system of pre-designed applications for cargo containment living, but what’s unique is that many of them are offered as temporary solutions to currently unused urban space – or space not meeting the highest and best use.

One example is the 4over2 mixed-use system where 4 apartments lay over 2 retail spaces. It’s a modern, simple, understated mixed-use design that can be relocated to a new address in less than a week.

The Studio 320 container design is an aptly named 320 square foot studio space offering a great room that utilizes the bulk of the space and adds a separated bath and sleeping area. Clearly this is a limited use size application, but again the design can be stacked 2 or 3 high with included stairs. Multiply the square feet accordingly and you get a very typical sized urban apartment.

Still another design, The Urban Mini-Tower is 2240 square feet consisting of two 640 square feet studio apartments above a 960 square foot commercial space, plus the studios share a 640 square foot roof-top garden. If elected a Cargo Elevator is also an available option. This particular design was originally employed for an unused urban surface parking lot where it quickly turned the real estate into a productive use.

The use of cargo containers while known well to the architecture/design professional community is still drastically under utilized and under appreciated by cities in the US where urban infill is needed. There are literally hundreds of under-utilized urban spaces now across the US that could benefit from this “cut and paste” solution.

It seems a good bet that as the US housing crisis settles into a permanent fixture (mortgage rules have changed for good), and cities look for affordable urban housing that can make an impact quickly and change as fast as our future dynamic economy we will see increasing numbers of container housing solutions similar to those of HyBrid Seattle pushed into use.

Media: 4over2 Studio 320 Urban Mini-Tower