Freitag, the Swiss company that recycles truck tarps and seat belts into messenger bags, stacked containers nine-high at their flagship in Zurich.  The towering facade of mismatched, weathered steel panels represents the brand’s ethos and aesthetic perfectly.
     The intimate scale of the containers makes them ideal for single family houses. A chic vacation home in South America was formed by splitting, stretching, and enclosing two crates in clear glass and wood slats. It looks as if it popped out of a lifestyle magazine, and betrays nothing of the crates’ commercial origins. In an entirely different spirit, a pair of Minnesota architects fashioned a country house for themselves by setting down two crates in a forest and covering them with a roof. The house has an warm, welcoming, unfussy feeling.
     Structures like this small house, that could be developed as prototypes that are inexpensive and simple to fabricate and transport, carry incredible promise. They could be mass produced, held in reserve, and deployed quickly throughout the world to provide emergency and interim housing. After all these containers are truly global; they’d fit right in wherever they were set down.