I happened to know about the containers in Bosnia after Patrice Duflos, a friend of my family was shot while installing these protections, he was one of the 200 UN soldiers who died there protecting civilians.
The death of another French soldier Eric Hardoin, was filmed by a television crew an led to a excellent documentary by French national TV on the work of the UN troops. It shows some quite good footage of the use of these containers, if you are interested, you can check it out here:

http://www.vodeo.tv/4-132-4320-moi-eric-mort-a-sarajevo.html
(VOD link, film in French, sorry…)
Sadly the only free extract I found is somewhat more macabre, although it gives you a pretty clear image of the problem…
http://video.cityvox.fr/video/iLyROoaftuzc.html

Sorry for drifting off a bit from the subject, but I also think, as architects we can learn things from this.
And don’t worry, it will be back to our usual good humoured but virulent debates next post. ;-)

Your comment is the most instructive, inclusive, enlightened, and informed opinion of the bunch!!

I never heard about the sniper protection, that’s brilliant!

But to come back to inhabited containers, in the netherlands there is a chain of hotels called “qbic” that developed a sort of container/space-shuttle/boxy-thing that contains all the elements of a standard hotel room and can then be placed into any available room. Although not made from a reel container, I think the idea of a living capsule, capable of being deployed in any environment and bring all the necessary comfort is really interesting.

Heli, can you think of a better way to inhabit a warehouse ;-)

for those commenters who don’t seem to be aware, he was one of the first to work with containers….do a little research.

I think this will be part of our future, maybe not in America unless this crisis continues. But I can see it happening a lot in the poor parts of Latin America, especially coastal towns and cities.

This particular project is not my favorite. Why do people always want to disguize reality? It’s a shipping container, deal with it and make it look good without covering it with manuer. There are some really good projects out there though, I think we should be open minded and look at the huge benefits.

that is all.

I hope that you mean that you are working on proposing a method to cut down on the production of new storage containers as well as a place for them to go after they are used? Disgarded containers are a serious issue, or perhaps we should simply sink them all into the ocean to help create coral reefs like NYC-MTA did with the old Bluebird Subway Trains?

In the meantime, anyway to repurpose/recycle these giant metal behemoths is well targeted to our current times.

@Heli
There is plenty of more information about his other projects on his website, which answers many of your questions.