Little Boxes
Jesse Walker | January 11, 2008, 10:53am
Friday fun link: a
website "devoted to listing as many examples of people using shipping containers as architectural elements as I can find." Like this "mixed wood and container home":
Or this retractable café:
Or this enormous "makeshift mall" in Ukraine:
That last one might not look impressive -- hey, it was closed at the time -- but the
story behind the mall is pretty amazing:
[T]he last Soviet city fathers of Odessa expelled the pioneers in a previously unknown free market from the city, banishing them
to a 10-acre spot seven kilometers, or about four miles, from the city's limits....That was in 1989, as the Soviet Union itself was unraveling, and what has since emerged is Europe's most extraordinary and, some say, largest market.
It now sprawls over 170 acres. The largest shopping center in the United States, the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn., covers 96 acres, though all comparisons end there.
The market is part third-world bazaar, part post-Soviet Wal-Mart, a place of unadulterated and largely unregulated capitalism where certain questions -- about salaries, rents, taxes or last names -- are generally met with suspicion.
Open every day but Friday, the market now has 16,000 traders or so and a central staff of 1,200, mostly security guards and janitors, making it the region's largest employer. An estimated 150,000 shoppers come each day, traveling in hundreds of buses from as far as Russia, more than 300 miles away, in search of the bargains that the evident avoidance of customs and taxes makes possible.
"Over the 15 years of its operation it has been called different things," the Ukrainian newsweekly Zerkalo Nedeli wrote in 2004, "but in fact it is a state within a state, with its own laws and rules. It has become a sinecure for the rich and a trade haven for the poor."
Teresa Nielsen Hayden has more on shipping container architecture
here, and CNN tackles the topic
here. Virginia Postrel praises shipping containers in general
here. "As generic as the 1's and 0's of computer code, a container can hold just about anything, from coffee beans to cellphone components," Postrel writes. That ain't half of it.
Shawn | January 13, 2008, 7:24am | #
"Shawn: If you do make it to the mall, let us know what you find there."
Ok, I went there this morning and bought a shirt ($30) and pair of shoes ($70).
According to my sources (the bartender down the street from where I live):
There are about 80,000 people working there.
They have their own private medical, police and fire forces.
Odessa is a major port and the goods typically come directly from China, etc.
People come from all over the Ukraine to make shopping trips there. There is no other place in the Ukraine where one can buy the same variety of goods and the prices are better than traditional stores.
A few observations:
It is called simply 7KM. Mini-buses from the central train station take 20-30 minutes and cost $.60 each way. Not all of the structures are container-based. There are large corrugated metal buildings and many small kiosks as well. The main are does seem to be container-based, with rows of containers functioning much like aisles at the grocery store, but without quite as much organization. The aisles are color-coded, which helps with navigation. Each store consists of two containers stacked one on top of the other with the bottom one being the display and sales area and the top one being storage. There are small stairs or a ladder in the back. The container doors are kept open during business hours and used as display space. The aisles are about wide enough for two people to comfortably walk past each other. Although the ground in the aisles is paved, there's a decent coating of mud everywhere.
It reminds me a lot of the markets that you can see all over Europe, but huge and more permanent. Also, I didn't notice a lot of haggling going on. Really, I've never seen anything that compares to it in scale. It's bigger than the Mall of America and the product density is maximized. There's no wasted space that I could see.
