ABSTRACT
In discussing architectural media, tools, and their relationships with beginning design, I’ve found it useful to return repeatedly to the shipping container: the ubiquitous object, the thing at once everywhere and nowhere. The shipping container is everywhere, in the sense that it can be found in cities and towns across the world, and it is nowhere, because it has no “place” in the sense that well-known buildings are bound up with specific places. Along the way, the book has addressed buildings with strong connections to places—St. Peter’s in Vatican City, the Taj Mahal in Agra—not so much as counterpoints to the shipping container but as parallel threads, demonstrating how the issues raised in discussing the one can be relevant to discussing the other.
