Stephen Shang, CEO of Falcon Structures, explores the evolution of shipping container buildings over the past 20 years
Stephen shared Falcon Structures’ journey from portable storage to job site offices, military training facilities, and beyond.
He highlights the versatility of shipping container buildings and discusses the challenges faced, including design constraints and compliance with building codes.
How have your structures and your designs evolved in the 20 years that you’ve been working shipping container buildings?
When I first started out, it was all about this portable storage, and we even called them storage containers. Back then, nobody really knew what a shipping container was. They all thought we were selling Tupperware or something like that, but we listened to the marketplace.
As we started getting involved with renting out portable storage containers for construction sites to store electrical gear or plumbing fixtures, we listened to the customer. Then we started getting the question, can you build us job site offices out of these containers? We’d love to use them.
They’d be ground-level, highly secure. we knew a couple of guys could help us figure that out. We started figuring it out. Next thing you know, we were in the kind of job site trailer business and renting out what we call ground-level offices.
During the 2008 recession, about 67% of our customers were in the construction industry. We had all these containers coming back off the construction sites. We’re like, oh, man, what do we do now? We’ve personally guaranteed all these loans to build up a huge rental fleet. How do we get ourselves out of it?
Once again, we listened to the customers. We were approached by the Air Force, and they asked us, can you build us a simulated village using these shipping container buildings? They wanted Middle Eastern theatre.
They needed a way to train their troops against IEDs. Not knowing what it was, we’re like, yeah, of course we can. Next thing you know, we’re in the military training business.
After four or five years, we had built probably the largest container-based city in the US. It’s a simulated city of 700 shipping containers out in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico.
In 2014 and 2015, Falcon Structures was born. From there, we’ve really developed how to build cost structures using containers and build them efficiently through a manufacturing mindset.
What is it about a shipping container that makes it so versatile?
There are three things about the shipping container that make it more versatile. One is there’s something about starting with a box versus starting with a blank sheet of paper that I believe captures the human imagination.
There’s a book my wife bought for my kids. It’s called, It’s Not Just a Box. It’s about this little rabbit, who finds an Amazon refrigerator box. Next thing you know, it’s a racing car. It’s a burning inferno.
It’s sort of starting from nothing; we’re starting with a big box. It captures people’s imaginations. You see a lot of applications using containers.
I’ve been doing this for 20 years, and I’m still amazed at some of the things that come to us to this day. In the last few years, we’ve seen people building swimming pools in these shipping container buildings.
They’re building vertical farms to grow crops in. They’re building wastewater enclosures. I mean, it’s just limitless. I think it’s because we all have that little rabbit inside of us. So that’s the first part of it.
The second part of it is from a very practical standpoint. Containers are not as flexible in their dimensions as a traditional modular structure. Traditional modular, you can go 12 feet wide, 13 feet wide, 16 feet wide, if you want to. You can go 53 feet long, 60 feet long, 35 feet long.
With a container, you’re stuck and have to creative with the modular structure. You’re stuck with a 20-foot container, or a 40-foot container. They’re all eight feet wide and some of them are nine and a half feet tall. Some of them are eight and a half tall. You’ll notice our tagline is think inside the box. We believe with these design constraints, that it forces you to be creative on how to use that space.
Because you’re limiting your design and discipline, you get much more creative ideas that come out of it. On top of that, you can ship these containers anywhere you want in the world because they’re shipping containers.
There’s an entire global infrastructure that’s built around shipping these containers all over the world, by rail, by truck, by ship, even by airplane.
The third reason, I don’t know why this is, but there are people out there who think shipping containers are cool. They’re kind of cool. Some people like the industrial chic look of them. Some people think you’re upcycling. There’s a lot of different reasons.
I’m not sure if that’s going to stick. It’s stuck for the last ten, 15 years. Maybe that’s something that comes and goes. But because they’re cool, people tend to want to embrace projects with them a lot more than just traditional construction.
What are the challenges of working with shipping containers?
Definitely the design constraints side because that is a challenge. You have to be really clever in the way that you think about these. I would say that one of the biggest challenges compared to traditional construction or even modular construction, is we are repurposing a shipping container.
If you’re looking at getting involved in permanent modular construction you have to comply with building codes. In 2015, when we first went down this path, the building codes didn’t know what to do about containers.
There was a real interest in the marketplace, and it attracted attention from different building code officials around the country. It was just this patchwork of regulations that emerged. Some of it was duplicative. Some of it was conflicting. To build a container-based structure that was building code compliant was extremely difficult.
The main reason for that was these building code officials didn’t know whether or not they were safe, unlike steel that you buy from the steel yard or lumber. There was no traceability on the materials because these things are usually built overseas.
The question people has was ‘how do I know that it’s going to withstand these kinds of forces or that the wind is not going to blow it over?’ They’ve been across the ocean, they’ve been field tested, but a building code official is not going to buy that.
That was one of the big challenges that we saw in 2015 when we first joined MBI. That’s when I got involved with the Government Affairs Committee.
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