by James Dunne

I recently paid a visit to the new DeKalb Market in Downtown Brooklyn. DeKalb Market is temporary market place located on the future CityPoint development site located on the corner of Flatbush Avenue and Fleet Street (one block south of DeKalb Avenue). The market has a variety of boutique shops and food vendors situated in metal shipping containers. With about 20 stores, it’s open seven days a week, but most vendors are only there on the weekends.

Utilizing shipping containers for purposes other then shipping goods is a practice that was once only associated with third-world countries, where old containers were out-fitted to serve as housing, or often shipping containers were brought into natural disaster areas to serves as temporary housing or disaster relief command centers.

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However, in recent years I’ve noticed a surge in the popularity of shipping container use - it seems to have become a trend with architects and designers to tinker and work creatively with the containers. There have been large houses created from combining the containers, with the results barely resembling the original containers.

The photo below is an office that runs on solar panels that I spotted at the new Brooklyn Bridge Park.

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NYC is an ever-changing landscape. Big projects such as CityPoint often take years to get off the ground, and are typically constructed in stages. A temporary market place constructed of shipping containers is a great interim use. With new and creative shipping container uses popping up all over, I think this shipping container trend, whether in the third-world or the developed world, is here to stay.