Finland – Shanghai Metal Corporation

The Many Architectural Applications of Shipping Containers vol.5

Our fifth chapter on shipping containers’ architectural applications will discuss examples of how and why they are an excellent choice for creating affordable and sustainable schools and student homes. It might be that even this generation of students will get familiar at least one of them.

Using shipping containers as temporal school houses has at least two rationales. The first reason is that especially old wooden school buildings are likely to have mold issues that may cause severe health risks. For example an article of a Finnish science magazine Tiede states that every second school in Finland has mold issues (source). Students are therefore either forced to stay in their mold school or move to another school. Container schools could be installed in relatively short time and with relatively low costs.

The second reason can be studied from Samsung. In 2012, the South Korean electronics chaebol established a shipping container school in the South African village of Phomolong as a part of its corporate-social responsibility program. The school offers its 21 students premium education facilities with solar powered electricity system and notebooks, an Internet connection and Samsung Galaxy tablets. (source)

The lack of affordable student homes creates another application for shipping containers. For instance in Finland there is a high demand for student homes as the number of available apartments in student villages is getting lower. Students are now forced to pay a very high monthly rent. Some students have to pay even over 800 euros of monthly rent. According to a survey conducted by the Finnish periodical Iltalehti, 40 percent of the thousand respondents said that their funds are really low due to expensive rents. They are now designing economical student homes, made of containers.

Harri Nordling, a Finnish container home designer, has designed beautiful container student homes. The container homes can also be expanded to multi-storeyed blocks of flats. This sort of solution has already been applied in Sweden. Container homes are easy to build. They are also low-cost and environmentally friendly.

So many deficits in housing can nowadays be solved with shipping containers. Therefore we offer a large variety of shipping containers in Shanghai Metal Corporation. We also offer prefabricated container building solutions. Please visit our web pages for detailed descriptions. Check also our social media sites.

Tuomas P. // SMC Editor

Pictures and original articles: Tiede magazine, Cnet, The Volt Report,Arch Daily, Wintech Modular Buildings, Lion Containers, Design Boom, Iltalehti.fi, Hansacontainers.com

Continue to chapter 6.

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The Many Architectural Applications of Shipping Containers vol. 1

There are many ways how to use shipping containers to create affordable and sufficient real estate for housing or business use. In these series of blogs we will briefly discuss some of them. The volume one takes you to container homes, hotels, and retail outlets.

The benefits of container homes have been recognized worldwide. For instance, in Finland, container housing is becoming a great solution for offering affordable student homes.

One of the benefits of shipping containers is their modularity. Containers are like Lego blocks. You can pile them up and thereby even create a multiple floor or a multiple wing mansion. Still, sometimes only one container is enough for building a home.

A container hotel system is a new trend to take the hotel business closer to a specific clientele. Besides, the hotel solutions are made for luxury consumers offering them a wonderful experience. For example an UK company Snoozebox offers portable hotel services to any location or any events. The portable lodge has 40-400 rooms and each room has a flat screen and a Wifi.

Conventional retailing includes setting up a store in a fixed location and paying the rent for the use of the real estate. Modern retailing on the other hand, is mobile, meaning that instead of waiting for the customers to come to you, you will be able to easily relocate your business closer to your customers. This simple procedure is going mainstream and it can only be done with shipping containers.

If one already has an online retail business, it can be easily expanded offline with shipping containers and create a combined retail infrastructure that has all the advantages of both online and offline retailing.

Shanghai Metal Corporation sells shipping containers internationally. We also make prefabricated shipping container housing and office solutions. Please visit our website on containers and container buildings for detailed descriptions. Follow us also on these social media platforms.

Tuomas P. // SMC Editor

Sources: See our articles on container homes, hotels, and retail outlets.

Continue to chapter 2

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Prefab Construction Enables Skateboarding on Water!

The great thing about prefab architecture is that it can be built somewhere and placed elsewhere. Actually prefabricated construction can be placed anywhere, say, in space, underwater or on water. One cool instance of floating prefab is a skate ramp on Lake Tahoe.

This 7,000 lb was built in four days to promote Visit California’s Dream365 campaign. Over 300 man hours were needed to get the ramp on water. After finishing the project, the ramp was first tested by pro skateboarder Bob Burnquist.

The floating structure consists of an 8 ft (2.4 m) tall wooden bank ramp and a smaller 5 ft (1.5 m) secondary ramp. Both wooden ramps rest on top of a 36 ft (11 m) long floating platform, with the ramps stained with different colors for a creative effect and polished to optimize skating speed.

Floating skate ramps have also been built elsewhere. For example Finnish snowboarders Eero Aattala and Roope Tonteri realised the idea by installing a skate ramp on a lake in Finland. The ramp was also used for swimming and enjoying the Finnish Mid-Summer Festival.

Skateboarding and prefabricated construction seem to be a good match. This is also shown by a nonprofit company Skateistan that installed prefabricated shipping container skate parks in Afghanistan to enhance local physical education. You can read more about it from here.

We in Shanghai Metal Corporation have a wide experience in executing high-quality prefabricated building projects. If you are designing your own, please ask for our consultation by sending an inquiry. Please look at our website too see our former projects. Also follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Tuomas P. // SMC Editor

Pictures and original articles: Visit California, Jerry Blohm, Bob Burnquist, Gizmodo, Red Bull

In Container Homes Winter Is Always Outside

Shipping containers are a superior building material and the mainstream for affordable housing. As a form of prefabricated construction, shipping containers houses can to huge extent be built elsewhere than in their final destination. In order for shipping containers to become livable homes, they need a makeover including a proper insulation.

Shipping containers are usually described as an optimum construction material for areas with relatively high temperatures. The reason is that there are well know techniques on how make shipping container houses naturally ventilated. For instance the shipping container cruise terminal in Seville is designed to resist high temperatures during hot summers.

Shipping containers are also suitable for places where winters are long and cold, and where it snows a lot. Originally shipping containers were designed to resist rough weather in the seas during shipping and therefore shipping containers later became an excellent building material. It seems that shipping container architecture was invented like Coca-Cola – by accident.

There are examples of shipping container winter homes that are suitable for Northern countries such as Northern USA, Canada, Finland and other Nordic countries. For instance an American real estate agent Jeffrey White is transforming shipping containers into affordable and eco-friendly homes for low-income families in Salt Lake City. Each home is made out of two shipping containers, and the whole projects costs 120,000 dollars including the land they sit on. (source)

In order to build beautiful homes like these, the shipping containers need to be enforced with proper insulation. In Shanghai Metal Corporation we sell both shipping containers and highly moisture resistant glass wool for insulation. Our prefabricated container homes come with polystyrene foam insulation. If you are building affordable homes we will gladly offer you all the material. Just send us an inquiry and our English speaking staff will contact you. Meanwhile please visit our social media sites for future updates.

Tuomas P. // SMC Editor

Pictures and original articles: The Fair Verona, Jetson Green, Small Cabin Plans, Tiny House Blog, Inhabitat

Why Aren’t Mobile Phones Smaller?

Doesn’t Nokia 8810 phone and its metal cover bring great memories from the 90s? At that time, people got to witness the mobile phone wars with two Nordic technology enterprises, the Finnish Nokia and the Swedish Ericsson. That time resembles much of what is happening now between Apple and Samsung, the phones were just different.

Michael Douglas with a ‘log’ in the movie Wall Street.

The first mobile phone came out in 1973 when Motorola released its 1.1 kilogram ‘log’ that took 10 hours to charge and that could be used only 30 minutes. On 1989 Motorola released the first commercial phone Motorola DynaTAC 8000X that was like its predecessor and its insane price was 4000 US dollars.

From 1989 until the early 2000s Nokia designed the world’s best mobile phones whose prices were feasible for average consumers. Nokia gained much popularity trough movies as its 8110 ‘banana phone’ was viewed in the sci-fi movie called Matrix.

Since the early days, mobile phones were really big and thereby Nokia also tried to design smaller and smaller phones. In the 90s it was fashion to own a small phone, smaller than anyone else had, or they were picked at school. Since the rise of smart phones, phones have grown bigger again. If there weren’t any tablets today, smart phones could grow to those measures. Even now the boundary between tablets and phablets seems to be really narrow.

But what was it that prevented Nokia and other manufacturers from designing even smaller phones? Technology does not set boundaries as components can be designed to be basically as small as people want. The main reason was the distance between mouth and ear. Smaller phones would not have been ergonomic enough. That simple!

Nokia 7650 was the first Nokia phone to have a built-in camera. It was also viewed in Tom Cruise‘s movie The Minority Report.

Like back in the days, today there is a lot of metal inside phones. Metals such as copper, aluminum and galvanized steel are used in phones such as the iPhone 6. Those metals can be purchased from Shanghai Metal Corporation. In order to learn more, please visit our website. Please also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.

Tuomas P. // SMC Editor

Pictures and original articles: Nokia, Youtube, Web Designer Depot, Know Your Mobile, Comunidad Movistar, Parade

Living on the Edge of a Floating House

In today’s world people are taking construction business the dew dimensions. The ultimate extremes seem to be in space and underwater but another setting of prefab architecture is on the surface of water.

The world has many examples of beautiful floating architecture. A floating house has basically two features that are superior compared to their on-the-ground counterparts.

First, floating houses offer safety in areas suffering from floods. An article on BBC tells about an idea of floating houses saving people from UK’s floods. Besides residence, also school buildings have been converted into floatable forms. The concept of floating school buildings has already been applied in Nigeria.

Second, a floating building also operates as a transportation method. An example has been set in Finland, where sauna rafts have become a sort of a summer trend. Sauna rafts are basically rafts that are equipped with motor engines that move the raft in a moderate speed. Inhabitat has written more about the design of Finnish sauna rafts that also include a patio and hammocks. Formerly Shanghai Metal Corporation wrote an article about container saunas and container swimming pools, but this solution has both of them in one package.

For construction businesses the environment brings challenges as we’ve seen in case of floating architecture. In large major projects it’s the pioneers of the business who define the standards for quality. Shanghai Metal Corporation is one of them, not only because of the width of its business that encompasses prefab building, containers and steel building but also due its success in executing successful projects including some of the largest steel bridges in China.

For information about our construction projects, please visit our website. Please also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.

#BuildingValueAcrossTheGlobe

Tuomas P. // SMC Editor

Pictures and original articles: BBC, The Huffington Post, Inhabitat, Inhabitat, Inhabitat, Inhabitat, Inhabitat

What if Apple Was Started in a Shipping Container?

On April 1, 1976, the two biggest Steves in the world’s history, Jobs and Wozniak, started a company called Apple that has had a major impact in our lives. Like many companies before and after them, the visionaire and the tech-guru started their business from a garage. Apple’s business started to gain momentum when an American investor with Finnish family roots, Mike Markkula offered his financial capital and expertise on January the first 1977. On April the same year, the company released its first masterpiece, the Apple II personal computer that turned out be a ticket from the garage office. The next wave of success had to be waited until 1984 and the publishing of the Macintosh. Apple had brought to the market the first computer with a graphical user interface (GUI) already in 1983. But because the price of the computer called Lisa was too high for consumers, Macintosh had to be the solution. Macintosh’s ground breaking TV commercial, directed by Ridley Scott, was aired during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII on January 22, 1984. Due to conflicts with the board of directors, Jobs was fired in 1985. According to his speech in the university of Stanford in 2005, getting fired from Apple was one of the best things ever happened to him. In 1996 Apple bought NeXt, the company founded by Jobs, and then began the era of iMacs, iPods, iPhones and iPads. In the beginning of September 2014, we all witnessed the publish of the new iPhone 6 and the Apple Watch. Many companies after and before Apple have started their business operations from a garage. The list is long and it includes companies such as Disney, Hewlett-Packard, Harley-Davidson, Google, Amazon and Mattel to name but a few. Today’s start-ups, or, the multinational corporation of tomorrow have another choice besides a garage, shipping containers. Shipping containers are a modular building material that is also durable and feasibly priced. Because of their physical properties, start-up business managers are able to design customized offices. Whether it is a swimming pool, hotel, home or an office, Shanghai Metal Corporation is a reliable provider of shipping containers. To learn more about our large variety, please visit our website. Please also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. Try also downloading our mobile application by scanning the QR code below with your new iPhone 6. Tuomas P. // SMC Editor Pictures and original articles: Hola.com, Wikipedia, Popsugar, Forbes, Irish Mirror, Wikipedia, World Home Design Ideas Magazine, Retire@21, Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Better Education Obtained in Container Schools

Today shipping containers are used to build apartments, hotels, stores and saunas to name but a few. But why does it make sense to build schools out of containers?

The first reason is that especially old wooden school buildings are likely to have mold issues that may cause severe health risks. For example an article of a Finnish science magazine Tiede states that every second school in Finland has mold issues (source). Students are therefore either forced to stay in their mold school or move to another school. Container schools could be installed in relatively short time and with relatively low costs.

In Orange County California, creative architects had an over three months projects of expanding the Waldorf School in Costa Mesa by using shipping containers. It took 99 days to build four buildings out of 32 shipping containers. The eco-friendly construction project cost two million US dollars which was estimated of being 10-20 percent cheaper than an “old-school” building project. Also it would have most likely taken more time than 99 days to finish by using other material than shipping containers.

There are many types of internationally standardized shipping containers. Some have an open top and some can be opened from the sides. Thereby it gives designers limitless opportunities to develop mobile education facilities. In order to solve mold related problems or take education to less developed areas, governments, nonprofit organizations and companies’ CSR managers should look for containerized education solutions.

Shanghai Metal Corporation is a proud provider of shipping containers. Our wide variety of container products can be seen in our website http://www.smccontainer.com. We hope that you also follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. You can also try our new mobile application by scanning the QR code below.

Tuomas P. // SMC Editor

Pictures and original articles: Tiede magazine, Cnet, The Volt Report, Arch Daily, Wintech Modular Buildings, Lion Containers, Design Boom

Bathing Made Mobile with Container Saunas

There are a number of ways how to reuse used shipping containers. Besides houses, offices, hotel, art galleries, stores and pools, shipping containers can be now used as saunas. A Canadian design studio Castor has designed the first container sauna.

The 8 ft container is a fully-operational sauna box that uses wood for heating and solar energy for lighting. The mobile sauna also comes with an integrated iPod stereo and an electric guitar hook-up. Also additional creature comforts such as a magnetic truck light, castor stool, and bronze antlers are included.

Sauna is originally a Finnish invention and is deeply rooted into the nation’s way of life. The Finnish history of using sauna for bathing and staying healthy spans over two thousand years. The Finns have a sauna in every house but they also place saunas in the lake or seaside of their summer cottages. Finns have formerly used portable saunas especially in military. Those saunas are most commonly made of tents.

The Finnish Sauna Society has made a list of sauna’s health benefits. Taking a sauna bath is studied to enhance sleep quality and memory, to lower blood pressure, increase energy levels and to cause good mood just to name but a few.

According to an article of Gizmag, Castor has sold about 10 units. The Sauna Box is priced really high-end with US 41,000 price tag. It is still unclear when the Canadian company will get competitors.

If you need a shipping container for your sauna solution, please contact us in Shanghai Metal Corporation. We are a major Chinese provider of shipping containers and we offer our solutions worldwide. To know more about our containers, please visit our website. Please also follow us on Twitter, Facebook,LinkedIn and Instagram. You can also download our mobile application by scanning the QR code below.

Tuomas P. // SMC Editor

Pictures and original articles: Gizmag.com, Gizmodo.com, Designboom.com,Gardenista.com, Hiconsumption.com, The Finnish Sauna Society

4 Strange Stockpiling Panics

Stockpiling panics can be triggered by the smallest of market shocks. Maybe a news report causes it, an unexpected price change, or word of mouth, but once the panic sets in chaos ensues. Each country has seen its own stockpiling panic, like raw materials, power, food and water. But the following countries have been a little more creative with their stockpiling choices.

Japan – Toilet paper

Japan’s bureaucrats don’t want the nation to be caught with its pants down the next time toilet paper supplies run short after a natural disaster.

That’s why the government is rolling out its latest public-awareness campaign, entitled “Let’s Stockpile Toilet Paper,” which involves an exhibition on the topic at the trade ministry, a summit of industry leaders and the sale of specially packaged “emergency use” toilet tissue.

USA – Sick Days

Due to loopholes in the employee benefit package, government employees of the USA are eligible for 2,164 sick days that they are eligible to draw from according to figures requested from the auditor’s office.

China – Cabbage

In Beijing especially, there are the piles of cabbage that accrue in communal courtyards, high-rise hallways and window ledges across the city. This has been common practice since the 1960’s industrialization to get people through harsh winters that may hinder food production.

Singapore – Sand

Some countries have strategic oil reserves; others stockpile rice or wheat. The island nation of Singapore has emergency reserves of imported sand. The government is now being forced to tap its sand hoard after its usual supplier, Indonesia, abruptly banned exports in February in a string of disputes between the two countries.

Currently, Raw material surcharges are spurring stockpiling of stainless steel and nickel across the globe. Finland’s Outokumpu OYJ (OUT1V), Germany’s ThyssenKrupp AG and Aperam SA (APAM) in Luxembourg all reporting boosts in deliveries.

So, why not beat the stockpiling surge and invest in nickel and stainless steel today? Shanghai Metal Corporation manufactures an array of value-added Metal Products, Building Systems, Shipping Containers, and Machinery. We are committed to delivering quality to businesses as an integrated global manufacturer, exporter, and supplier with offices and subsidiaries located throughout Asia, Europe, and the Americas. To find out more, please visit our website, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Or you could try our new mobile app by scanning our QR code.

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