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36

/ BUILDING DIALOGUE / MARCH 2015

2500 Larimer St.: Shipping Containers Fill the Gap

O

ur Shipping Container building at 2500

Larimer St. in Denver is one of our more

interesting projects. The concept of re-pur-

posing shipping containers is far from novel, but

using 29 containers to create an infill mixed-use

development was somewhat pioneering for our

team at Gravitas.

We were interested in exploring a shipping con-

tainer building specifically for a parcel of land we

had in Denver’s emerging River North neighbor-

hood. The neighborhood has industrial roots, but has

recently become fertile

ground for established

and emerging arts and

artists, as well as start-ups

and creative businesses. A

mixed-use building made

entirely of shipping con-

tainers seemed the perfect

complement to RiNo’s mix of

art and utility.

To begin exploring the

concept, we looked to a few

successful container projects

in London and New Zealand

for inspiration, but we quickly

learned that Instagram photos

and articles in The Telegraph

could only take us so far. Lucky for

us, our general contractor, Sprung

Construction, had a large lot a few

blocks north of our site in RiNo that

would serve as our concept testing

ground.

For the first-generation model, we

built a two-story office space. The lay-

out was simple: We placed two 8-by-

40-foot containers side by side, and

mirrored that layout directly on top of

these two ground-level containers (just

as you would see them stacked on a car-

go ship). In order to see how efficiently

we could build a habitable office space

out of these containers, we tested a litany

of variables that would impact its success.

This included everything from wall insu-

lation (spray foam vs. batt), roof insulation

(interior vs. exterior), heating and cooling

(electric vs. forced air), drips and leaks, to

metal expansion and contraction, floor treat-

ment, the smells the containers emit when

they heat up, what size openings we could cut

in the container walls before they needed to be

structurally reinforced, and more. After observ-

ing how this double-decker office space fared

throughout winter, spring and summer, we used

our education from the various tests to proceed

with a more formalized set of plans.

While the field research proved valuable, the

project we envisioned was vastly different from

the four dented containers with small windows and

limited interior openings that we had just built. While

this first generation was beautiful in its simplicity and

efficiency, we were interested in creating a dynamic

mixed-use project, which added to the cost and com-

plexity. We stacked and oriented the containers with

micro retail and office space in mind, along with open

floor plans that would appeal to a variety of business-

es. Playing with Legos proved to be a more effective

resource than AutoCAD during the design develop-

ment phase, and through that, we ultimately honed

Ryan Diggins

Partner,

Gravitas

Development

Group

TRENDS

in Adaptive Reuse

John Gibbons

Completed exterior of 2500 Larimer St.