
Portable cabins are a smaller subset of modular buildings. Modular buildings can be prefabricated - this means that individual building units are manufactured off-site before being transported to the site for assembly. Modular buildings are buildings that are constructed from standardized “modules” or “units” that bear identical design cues and specifications. In the US, for example, shipping container homes have become a viable alternative to traditionally built homes amongst those who appreciate the affordability and environmentally-friendly attributes of container buildings. Today, shipping container architecture has become more common worldwide.

Clark patented a “ method for converting one or more steel shipping containers into a habitable building”. Shipping container architecture may have emerged as far back as the late 1960s when British architectural critic Reyner Banham proposed the feasibility of using shipping containers as a “plug-and-play” type of architecture. This is called “ shipping container architecture”.

Given this hard-wearing and robust characteristic, it has caught the attention of the construction and architecture industry to repurpose them into buildings. These large steel corrugated boxes that move 90 per cent of the goods around us, are hardy containers that are able to travel vast distances as a crucial part of our global supply chains. Also known as intermodal freight containers, shipping containers can fit into different forms of transport for ease of transfer from one point to another.

Shipping containers, as their name implies, are vessels for transporting goods around the world by rail, truck, and ship.
