Italian Green Frame Home Explores Sustainable Container Housing

The <a href="http://www.astorideponti.it/greenframehouse/" target="_blank">Green Frame House</a> was on display at the <a href="http://www.abitareiltempo.it/en/index.html" target="_blank">2010 Abitare il Tempo</a> in Verona, Italy this last September as a study in sustainable housing and recycling utilizing shipping containers as the foundation for the home. Using six standard shipping containers, <a href="http://www.astorideponti.it/english/scroll.html" target="_blank">Studio Astori De Ponti Associati</a> designed and built this modern looking eco home. The industrial looking structure included photovoltaics, a small-scale wind turbine and some advanced and energy efficient materials supplied by DuPont.

While the Green Frame House uses recycled shipping containers as its main components, it's in no way boxy in a boring way.

The home was on display at the 2010 Abitare Il Tempo in Verona Italy and designed by Studio Astori De Ponti Associati

The industrial look of the shipping containers was maintained on the exterior and the interior is white and modern.

Six shipping containers make up the two story home that amounts to 140 sq meter (1,500 sq ft).

The Green Frame House project was led by architects Antonia Astori, Nicola De Ponti and Ester Pirotta in collaboration with ArtContainer.org

The architects wanted to explore sustainable housing and felt that shipping containers would serve as a good jumping off point.

Green Frame House preserves the appeal of the containers' industrial design, giving a new lease on life to a structure which was otherwise destined to be discarded.

The project focused on energy efficient design along with renewable energy.

A solar system was designed to be mounted on the roof of the second story along with a small-scale wind turbine.

DuPont also provided some of their advanced and energy efficient materials to construct the interior of the home to help insulate and maintain the moisture level.

From the architects: "“The Green Frame House project has come about from a meeting between ideas and dreams: the dream to restore life, meaning and utility to the container, understood as an abandoned object, and the idea of experimenting with a sustainability by defining forms for consolidated dwelling starting from an industrial module."

"In this sense the Green Frame House layout display presented at the fair possibly constitutes a kind of worksite in progress of a more ambitious project, one of broader scope, which aims to make this meeting a reality."

"The exacerbation of the contrast between finished and unfinished, between domestic interior and lived-in, corroded exterior expressly aims to bring out the latent vocation of these modular elements for dwellings. The attempt is to make a further small contribution by giving back to the container module the dignity of a dwelling that is neither ephemeral nor alternative."