Years of giant trade deficits in consumer goods have left North America awash in multimodal shipping containers. Some have designed houses from them. One episode of This Old House featured a builder in Florida assembling four to six of them into a moderately-sized house.

Compared to other materials, containers come cheap, but the trend has yet to catch. I imagine living in a 40-foot standard unit might feel like living in a single-wide mobile home, and zoning would relegate it to mobile home parks.

Meanwhile, they appear as design exercises, along with many other unusual houses.