To meet Johannesburg's rising need for affordable student housing, property developer Citiq has set a new watermark for utterly cray-cray adaptive projects, stacking brightly painted shipping containers atop and around a row of disused grain silos and offering them up to students on the cheap. Construction was completed in January, and by midway through the first week the units were available, students had filled nearly a third of the building's 370, according to a recent article in The Citizen entitled "Container living is weird, but cool." Aside from the wackadoo, Tetris-like visual appeal and the low, low price, Mill Junction's attempts to woo potential residents include study facilities, lounges, libraries, and computer labs.
A diamond-titanium blade was used to cut windows into the silo sections, which are estimated to be around 50 years old, but clean up pretty well, from the look of things, with interior finishings as colorful as the corrugated façades of the upper units. The apartments on the end come equipped with balconies, which look quite desirable, seeing as they sit above all the surrounding buildings in the neighborhood. The Citizen cites European inspiration for the shipping container idea, but honestly, at this point it could've come from anywhere; it's getting hard to remember what they were used for before prefabricated micro-homes. Anyway, quite the eclectic addition to the skyline, this, but then again, who doesn't love houses on other houses?
· Mill Junction Silo Stacked Container Apartments Overlook Johannesburg [Design Boom]
· Exploring Why, Oh Why, People Are Putting Houses on Roofs [Curbed National]
· All shipping containers posts [Curbed National]
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