Adam Kalkin’s contained approach to architecture

13 February 2009

Adam Kalkin is not suited to mainstream architecture. It’s not just that he specialises in creating buildings out of surplus supplies of shipping containers. It’s more that the New York artist/architect seems downright hostile to conventional practice and the nitty-gritty of getting things built.

“I’ve got a characterological problem,” he freely admits. “The whole idea of an architectural office kinda sucks. It depends on your temperament. It becomes managerial, bureaucratic. These things can easily take over the production of buildings. I can’t let that happen. I’d get so bored I’d kill myself.”

Kalkin has worked for himself for nearly 20 years, and is best known for designing shipping container houses, apartments, cafés, schools and even entire villages. Last week, he returned to his old training ground at the AA to deliver a lecture. To the audience’s surprise, he focused on music —Nirvana and the Beach Boys — as much as his own trademark container architecture. The lecture was conceived as Kalkin’s take on John Cage’s famous “silent” composition, 4’33’’. On this occasion, the architect’s words marked the intervals of the piece.

This leftfield approach might have been anticipated. Kalkin evidently considers himself something of a comedian: his website www.architectureandhygiene.com features videos on how to wear facial prosthetics and how to hit the perfect tennis forehand. There’s a selection of jingles, too, some sung before and some after taking antidepressants.

But he is serious about building and hugely frustrated when projects are thwarted, for example, by economics, divorcing clients or land ownership battles. The container designs are his passion, with their “Lego-like” and almost “amateur” quality.

“Containers present a set of problems that are non-architectural,” he says. “It sets you off on a different trajectory. I like that.”

His recent trip to London coincides with publication of Quik Build: Adam Kalkin’s ABC of Container Architecture, a book of his projects from the past 15 years.

He became interested in the potential of surplus containers after using one in an art collaboration with Aernout Mik in 1994. Since then, he has explored their possibilities in projects such as the 12-container Adriance House in northern Maine, and Kalkin House at Vermont’s Shelbourne Museum, both double-height buildings. The project that generated most interest was Quik House in 2001. It was developed as a prefab, three-bed product made from six shipping containers, to be ordered online and completed in three months including site work.

The new book features these and other, mostly unrealised, projects such as Quik Build Ecosystem refugee village, designed to address the problem of “millions of inadequately housed people around the world”; and Yahoo Heterotopic Tower, a Wi-Fi structure with a series of miniature, vertically stacked rooms accessed from an external steel stairway; it goes up in three hours and is intended for short stays on college campuses. There is also the architect’s own home, Bunny Lane, New Jersey, an industrial steel shed built around a 19th century clapperboard cottage, conceived as both residence and artwork, and currently on the market for $2.8 million.

Kalkin’s personal favourite is the Boite en Valise concept for a museum in miniature, through which visitors pass at speed lying on their backs on a conveyor belt, taking in the exhibits as they go.

Although he may be frustrated by the traditional practice of architecture, Kalkin’s singular approach affords him plenty of interesting opportunities. At the 2007 Venice Biennale, he built a push-button café for coffee seller Illy using a container with flip-down sides that unfolded in under a minute using hydraulics. He is currently working on a seven-storey container apartment block in Salt Lake City, set to be the first mid-rise container building.

But for all his achievements, Kalkin is disenchanted by the conventional practice of architecture. “It’s pearls before swine,” he says, bluntly. “You can give people awesome shit and they wouldn’t know it. How do you go forward? What do you do? I don’t really know the answer.”