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USF architecture students create unique building

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By LINDSAY PETERSON | The Tampa Tribune

Published: May 22, 2009

TAMPA - The 4-ton steel container dangled at the end of a crane over the construction site.

University of South Florida architecture students had worked on the project for two years, designing the building, getting the city's go-ahead and laying the foundation.

If their drawings and measurements and sore muscles were going to amount to anything, they would know it in the next 10 minutes.

"All the work we have been doing, this is when it becomes real," said student Amanda Prouty on Tuesday, watching the crane operator bring the container into position through power lines and tree branches.

The stakes were even higher for Gloria Harmon. She started the whole thing when she approached assistant architecture professor Stanley Russell about getting help to build a new food pantry for her East Tampa church.

The church's old wood-frame pantry was long past its prime. But the plan for its replacement was a bit of an experiment. Russell and his students wanted to use recycled steel shipping containers.

Harmon met Russell when he came to an East Tampa redevelopment meeting in early 2007. He was looking for a community service project for his architecture students. Harmon liked his spirit.

She'd recently retired as a middle school assistant principal and had set her sights on replacing the food pantry at her church, the Kingdom of God, at the edge of the railroad tracks off of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

She'd never heard of anyone building anything with shipping containers, but after meeting with the students to explain the church's needs and hearing their ideas, she did some research.

Architects and builders around the world have long used shipping containers for cheap storage and construction, particularly in areas where building materials are scarce. But they're becoming chic now as a big way to recycle.

The USF students' design used three 8-foot by 40-foot containers arranged in sort of a pinwheel around a concrete slab. Together they would become a pantry, kitchen, classroom and multipurpose room.

The containers came from A AAmerican, on Adamo Drive, whose primary business is providing shipping containers for storage, construction and other "secondary land uses," said owner Dale Payne.

They're built in China, and Payne gets them when their owners don't need them anymore to carry shoes, toys, computer parts, whatever consumers are buying. The container supply goes up and down, depending on how goods are moving around the globe, he said.

Lately, he's been getting a lot that make just one trip from China to the United States, then go up for sale.

Payne has followed the container reuse business closely for about five years. The USF project is the first one he's heard about in Hillsborough County using multiple containers to create a building.

For the past two months Russell's 18 students have worked in two places – preparing the foundation at the pantry site and retrofitting the containers at A AAmerican, creating openings for the windows and doors and hanging drywall inside.

Russell likes to give his students a chance to actually build the structures they design. "They get a sense of the materials that go into a building. And they develop an appreciation for how hard this work is."

"We get our hands dirty," said second year architecture student Paul Martinez. They've also learned about the neighborhood their building will serve, seeing the people on the street as they walk to a corner market, hearing their jazz and hip hop bouncing from boom boxes and car stereos.

Some of the people in the low-income neighborhood were wary of the students at first. But they got used to seeing them at work. They even became a little protective, Harmon said. "We have some undesirable things around here, but if the men saw it, they would say, 'No, not on this street.' "

Harmon's church raised money to buy much of the material for the project, but a dozen companies donated goods and time. The students worked for free, and once they started made steady progress.

Still Harmon didn't let her hopes get too high until this week, when the first renovated container arrived at the site.

"I was shaking," she said. "When I arrived….and I saw the container, I was literally shaking because I knew we were at a point that this is real."

As the skies threatened another downpour, she and the students watched workers attach cables to the container's four corners. Then they looped the cables around a big hook and the crane operator slowly lifted the container off the truck.

Using ropes to guide the container from the ground, workers guided it into position as the crane operator brought it down, inch-by-inch, onto the foundation the students had laid. And it fit.
Prouty snapped pictures. Harmon cheered, "You did it."

There's more work to be done, painting, hanging doors and windows. But that's the easy part, she said.

"The Eagle has landed."

Reporter Lindsay Peterson can be reached at (813) 259-7834.

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