Late last month, during a trip to Victoria, we visited the site in the Ferndale neighbourhood where Keith Dewey of Zigloo Design is building “Zigloo Domestique,” a house constructed from eight cargo shipping containers and which will soon become the Dewey family home.

The concept of using shipping containers for shelter is not new. Containers have been used as shelter in many ways including for emergency and disaster housing and for military operations world wide, and as live/work spaces in Container City in London, England.

But the past few years have seen development of a container architecture movement that is dedicated to transforming containers that were destined for the scrap yard into livable, attractive, modernist homes.

To build Zigloo Domestique, Dewey bought eight scrap containers for less than $3,000 each, stacked them over a concrete foundation, and welded them together to form the bones of a three-level, 1,800 square foot home.

Although 1,800 square feet may seem modest in an era of monster homes, thoughtful design has ensured more than adequate space for Dewey, his wife, and their twelve-year-old daughter. The basement, which is mainly below grade, contains the utility area, one of the two bathrooms, and a bedroom/activity room for the Deweys’ daughter.

The main floor is divided into a family/living room, and a kitchen that will feature all drawer-based appliances, leaving plenty of room above the working space to display the family’s art collection.

The upper floor is divided into a master bedroom and a studio. This level also contains the second bathroom, which has a skylight above the tub. A curved steel roof above this level provides airy ceiling heights of 9½ feet.

All rooms wrap around a central open staircase. Domestique also has five balconies and in-floor radiant heat. Interior walls will be finished with drywall over spray foam insulation. Pieces that have been removed from the container configuration have been used as fencing.

Domestique sits on a panhandle infill lot, about 4,000 square feet, with very little street front exposure. It has a range of attractive outlooks, including a gracefully aging brick apartment building, neighbourhood gardens, and, in the distance, Mount Baker. Nearby are the Belfry Theatre and the Fernwood Community Association, which is rehabilitating an existing two storey storefront building to provide affordable, multi-family housing.

There is a range of advantages in using containers for construction. Because they are so inexpensive, construction costs run around $150 per square foot, compared to around $225 per square foot for conventional wood frame construction. Money saved on basic construction can be reallocated to higher quality more enduring finishes. Even though containers aren’t particularly attractive in their original state, they can be a blank canvas for creating an attractive home design.

Layouts are constrained only by site limitations and building code requirements. Container houses offer the same functionality as conventionally built houses. They can be finished with any kind of cladding including cedar, steel, and glass.

Containers are also extremely strong. They are overbuilt to protect their cargo and to withstand harsh elements. They can be stacked up to nine high, and still withstand hell, high water, and the earthquake everyone around these parts seems to feel we are overdue for.

Containers are easy to transport to the building site, and construction is much quicker than with conventional wood or steel framed dwellings, both of which add to their cost effectiveness.

Could Dewey’s Zigloo Domestique concept have a place here in Vancouver?

Ninety percent of the world’s cargo travels in shipping containers, and as far as the cargo industry in concerned, containers have a very short useful life. If they get scratched, dinged, dented, tagged, or just begin to look a little the worse for wear, they are consigned to the scrap heap where they may slowly rust away for years before they are recycled.

Thanks to our buying habits containers arrive on our shores full of stuff. And when they are not dumped into the scrap yard, they are shipped back empty to Asia to bring us even more stuff.

What with Vancouver’s city council approving highway oriented retail on Marine Drive, more big box stores are inevitable. There will be plenty of spare containers kicking around.

Although Mayor Sam Sullivan announced it a couple of months ago during the World Urban Forum, Vancouver’s Eco-Density initiative hasn’t started to take shape. Whether Sullivan’s Eco-Density program comes to fruition or not, Vancouver is short of developable residential land.

Container-based structures are not only affordable, they can have very compact footprints, are stackable, and can be made to look attractively modern. Perhaps they should have a part to play in this (or any) city’s intelligent densification.

Other links to explore:
Steelhome at Blogspot
Adam Kalkin
Shipping Container Architecture

A member of my family is seriously ill, and my posting will be sporadic over the next while.

I love Bob Dylan. Always have. Always will.

So, I should be excited about the news the he’s opening his North American tour here in Vancouver on October 11 in support of his new album, Modern Times.

But the guy tours 360 days a year and writes songs during his meal breaks. So it’s hard to see this concert date as an opening night. Even though he will be featuring his new album, and at least one of the Kings of Leon, Foo Fighters, or The Raconteurs will be along for the show, I can’t conjure more than a vague interest in seeing him.

I’ve seen Dylan perform falling down drunk, sober and clear, bored and detached, and totally engaged. Now that he’s a senior citizen, it’s not likely he’ll be drunk, at least while he performs. That would take more energy than he probably has.

I used to think Dylan was a kind of god, until I watched the Scorcese special on Dylan and his music and realized he had no idea most of the time why he put words together the way he did.

He’s a songwriter, a bard, because he has no idea what else he could be. He does what he is.

We all should be so lucky.

Poor, poor Whistler.

First, they lost the sledge hockey arena because they couldn’t afford to pay the gap between the $20 million VANOC was willing to kick in and the projected $40-50 million construction costs. As a consolation prize, VANOC will be sweetening Whistler’s Olympic pot with $2 million they promised Whistler if the arena did not go ahead, along with an additional consolation of $3 million for a “community celebration plaza.”

Then, just when Whistler thought it could slink off into a corner and nurse its hurtin’ pride, it found out The IOC is asking for an additional 350 beds in the Whistler Athletes’ Village for an additional $10 to $20 million, as well as increased services at the Whistler broadcast and media centre.

The Whistler Question reported Mayor Ken Melamed has no idea where the additonal money will come from. “We aren’t prepared to pay for it. VANOC isn’t sure how they’re going to pay for it, and the IOC isn’t sure where they’re going to come to the table.”

The only thing Melamed and the rest of us know for certain is that we the people will eventually pay for it, with interest.

First, the good stuff:

The Vancouver Wooden Boat Society’s annual exhibition of floating wooden boats, boat-building demonstrations, hands-on boat-building for kids and families, knot-tying, sea shanties, and storytelling is on this weekend at Granville Island. There will also be boat races and rides in a replica of an 18th-century Spanish longboat. Aug. 24-27, 10 am–5 pm, Granville Island. Free admission.

And now, the nonsense:

Canada’ natural ruling party will be ending their Vancouver retreat later today. By then we will have a better idea who they want their next Prime Minister-in-waiting to be. My money’s on Iggy, because he’s the closest thing the Liberals have to Mr. Donut Stephen Harper.

Fantastic Four:Rise of the Silver Surfer starts production in Vancouver next week. Andre Braugher has left the cast of aging TV show ER mid story to join the Fantastic Four cast. He will be replaced on ER by Forrest Whittaker. I haven’t watched ER in years. It must be good, since it isn’t dead yet.

Another one for the not dead yet department, dinosaur rocker Tommy Lee has formed most of a new band, so far sans front man/woman man, and is taking it on the road. Perhaps Mr. Lee, overcome with grief at the serial weddings his ex-wife Pamela Anderson is celebrating with the quasi-talented Kid Rock, feels this tour will get him equal press time. And perhaps he still feels he has something to contribute “as an artist.”

The short of it is, Mr. Lee’s “Supernova” band is slated to take up space at Vancouver’s Queen Elizabeth Theatre next February 19. This is almost as frightening as Mick Jagger’s pre-Halloween gob, a version of which was on the front of the Vancouver Sun earlier this week.

One last thing. It’s exactly four months today till Christmas Eve. Time to get your shopping gears calibrated.

A few things that may be worthy of note on this fine, if somewhat cloudy, day:

According to Jeff Peters of the Prince George Citizen, the Vancouver Grey Sox want to scratch an itch that is more than 50 years old. It seems the Grey Sox are Vancouver’s senior men’s fast pitch team. I’d never heard of them either, and I’m married to a sports junkie.

Online gambling is illegal in Canada. But that hasn’t stopped Golden Palace.com from stepping up to sponsor the Raging Boll event here in Vancouver on September 23. It seems Uwe Boll, maker of the critcally-panned BloodRayne and other blood-soaked, video game-based movies, has challenged his detractors to a series of three round duke-em-outs. Too bad Mr. V. and I will be on holiday then. This one sounds like a truly class event.

On an entirely different plane from Mr. Voll’s, Volver, a Spanish-language film directed by Pedro Almovar and starring Penelope Cruz, will open this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival on September 28.

The Abbotsford News reports that a criminologist hired by the RCMP has recommended more safe injection sites, not only in the Downtown Eastside, but also in the Surrey/Whalley area. Meanwhile, the clock keeps ticking down to September 18, when Insite, Vancouver’s safe injection site, loses its Health Canada exemption.

Finally, if you can’t think of anything more exciting to do this Friday than a trek through the PNE grounds, you might want to check out FUSE at the Vancouver Art Gallery instead.

“If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

If there was anything that scared the bejebus out of me as a small child, it was the Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep prayer, and its suggestion that my life could end at anytime, including while I was sleeping. Even more frightening was the idea that the Lord might not want my soul, and it would be floating out in space forever, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

Now, a Florida company that calls itself Armour of God PJs, has gone one better. Can you imagine the pain and agony of certain hellfire poor children will go through when their protective satin pj’s are in the wash?

Saints preserve us, it’s amazing the lengths to which some people will go to make a buck.

When I was a wee young thing, my mother had a membership at Palm Springs Health Spa, which wasn’t in Palm Springs at all, but rather on Kingsway somewhere in Burnaby. In those days the “ladies” would exercise by plunking their posteriors and various appendages on machines that went round and round and sort of massaged whatever fat the ladies had, or thought they had.

Nowadays, Palm Springs Health Spa is no more. It was taken over by Fitness World a couple of decades ago. I’ve never been to the Fitness World on Kingsway, but I spend some time at their gym on Capilano Road in North Vancouver, and there is narry a fat massager to be seen.

Instead, there are a range of cardio machines, several versions of strength training machines, and plenty of free weights, as well as yoga, pilates, spinning, and aerobics studios, all reflecting to various degrees the nostrum that, when it comes to fitness, no pain means no gain.

Hope for effortless fitness does tend to resurrect itself from time to time in a pattern that is not dissimilar to the popularity of high protein, cabohydrate-free diets. This time hope has arrived in the shape of the Proellixe Whole Body Vibration Machine. One of the first of these miracle machines has been installed at Vancouver Spa, Enerchanges.

And what exactly does the ten minute, Whole Body Vibration workout achieve? Let’s hear it from the Proellixe folks themselves:

“Clients start by placing their feet on either side of the platform. Each time the right leg is accelerated upward (push-phase), the left leg is accelerated downward (slack-phase). At the same time, the right leg is subjected to flexion, while the left leg undergoes extension. As a consequence, the pelvis is rotated upward on the right side, and downward on the left, which elicits flexion in the vertebral column.

During the passive extension of the leg, the flexor muscles are activated, and during flexion, the extensors are activated. Likewise, repetitive rotation of the pelvis elicits alternating activation of the hip adductors and abductors of the iliopsoas muscles and the erector spinae muscles. There are hardly any muscles that are not activated during vibration exercise.”

It sounds so challenging, doesn’t it? Like dragging yourself up an airless flight of stairs on a hot day. But wait, there’s more!

“Users of the Proellix not only tone their bodies but they feel totally energized. So, any gym that can have the members associate that feeling of success to that gym will be assured of higher retention rates. Gyms can now add a whole new profit center with the only 16 ft² that Proellixe takes up.

For example, EnerChanges offers a couple of pricing plans to its clients. In one case, vibration is a value-add to a total clinic offering, and in another case, clients can just opt for a Proellixe plan only on a three month basis.”

It is understandable if, back in the 60s, my mother and her “girlfriends” thought that by sitting on those old-fashioned rolling machines, they were melting their fat away. But nowadays we know a lot more about what it takes to get, and stay, fit.

Still, I thought I’d be fair and give the Proellixe a try out. And the Proellixe folks were so happy about that, they decided to use my “before” pic in their press release. My “after” pic will be posted once I’ve completed their program.

And if you believe that, I’ve got a couple of fat rolling machines I can sell you. Cheap.

According to this item in the Globe and Mail, the eight much-awaited high tech public loos will finally be installed as street furniture here in town just in time for World Toilet Day, which has been celebrated every year since 2001 on November 19.

Meanwhile, the City of Vancouver’s web site, perhaps in a fit of bashfulness, still indicates the vaunted appliances will be up and running by “late summer.”

Here at Vancouveriste, it’s been one of those unproductive weeks. First, there was the neck cramp that started last week from sleeping in a draft, but didn’t go away. A range of home remedies that included plenty of ice, a range of essential oils, a little reiki, and Mr. V’s strong fingers were tried.

Nothing seemed to work for long; as a result I couldn’t spend more than 15 minutes in front of the screen before being confronted by what a physiotherapist once told me was “exquisite” pain. Which means the kind that hurts, inexorably.

So, finally I relented. I don’t believe in chiropractors, at least for these bones, but there is one in our neighbourhood who Mr. V. swears by, so I paid her a visit on Wednesday afternoon. Fifteen minutes and fifty dollars later I was half better. Monday afternoon I’m going back for what I hope is the other half.

I awoke on Thursday morning hoping for a really productive day, only to fall back into bed, exhausted. Some sort of twenty-four hour thing that felt a lot like food poisoning, but didn’t affect Mr. V. at all. So, I’m not sure what it was, and I hesitate to check with our Wednesday night dinner guest, in case I find out my cooking poisoned him, too.

Anyway, on to a few other tidbits:

Although the Vancouver Sun’s headline this morning was about how our panhandlers and drug dealers are cooling tourists’ jets, all may not be lost. Global warming will save our tourist dollar bacon eventually, at least according to this article in the Washington Post.

Like Mr. V. and me, you may not think they are all that funny. But Vancouver-based 1-800-GotJunk’s R.A.T. Advertising Trial television ads, developed by Vancouver advertising agency Rethink Advertising, will be featured in an upcoming TBS Network Special, The World’s Funniest Commercials, airing Wednesday, August 23, 2006.

The R.A.T. commercials were also nominees at this year’s Cannes Lions Award and are currently shortlisted for the Advertising and Design Club of Canada Awards in November 2006.

If you haven’t seen them, check them out here, but be sure to scroll down to the bottom of the page, and save yourself the pain of being exposed to Dr. Phil’s over-exposed blatherings and mug.

Finally, just to prove what a swinging city we are, the Canadian Auto Workers ended their conference here in Vancouver this week not with a whimper, but a bang, when president-for-life Buzz Hargroves celebrated his re-election by proposing to his long-time girl friend in front of a crowd of 1,000 rowdy union delegates.