By Robyn Lawrence

For green cred and innovation, this prototype kit house is hard to beat.

Made from repurposed shipping containers and pre-engineered recycled steel building components, based on Prius engineering, with a gray water system and a living roof, the Tim Palen Studio at Shadow Mountain is a pre-fab residence and workplace in one of the country’s harshest desert climates. Developed by ecotechdesign in conjunction with ecotechbuild, the hybrid house prototype is the first permitted shipping container house in the Mojave Desert near Joshua Tree, California. The kit-like housing product is being offered to the public for the first time, and its designer claims it costs about half of what locally available prefab alternatives run. It can be erected at the site, often in less than an hour.

“By combining high-efficiency and mass-produced modular construction methods with innovative design in one of the harshest climate zones in North America, we have developed a low-cost, sustainable, housing system that can be transported and quickly erected anywhere in the world,” says architect Walter Scott Perry, principal of ecotechdesign. 

Some notable features:

-Hybrid House Design: Based on the efficient Prius automobile engineering concept, the hybrid house concept combines diverse pre-engineered building and energy conservation features to maximize efficiency and cost savings while offering design flexibility.

- All Recycled Steel Construction: The project is composed of diverse steel components, including six repurposed ISO containers, a Butler pre-engineered building, a 10,000-gallon steel water tank and a metal shade canopy with integrated steel framing system that provides extraordinary strength, earthquake, fire and wind protection, as well as large window and door openings to maximize natural daylighting, ventilation, and cooling.

-Solar Home Shading System: A bolt-on, adjustable steel frame and shade system creates 50 percent solar heat, glare and wind reduction on the building, and a solar breezeway allows for plug-in attachment of future solar electric and water heating panel arrays.

- Living Roof: Movable, bolt and add-on modules are irrigated with gray water and planted with native desert plants and sedums to absorb heat, glare, dust and CO2.

- Water Conservation: Integrated gray water, water harvesting and storage systems.

For further information regarding our storage containers for rental or sales, contact AZ Containers at 877-292-6937 to see how the most basic steel box to a customized, climate controlled storage or workspace with windows, they’ll have your solution on it’s way to you fast. Be sure to see the progress of our container home under construction on the home page, we're into phase 5.