TEXAS: Seven years after it was announced, an innovative Detroit building is finally being built in the city’s Corktown neighborhood.
The Detroit Free Press reports that Three Squared Construction, a Detroit-based company, started working on a three-story building on Trumbull Avenue.
The unit is a model made from shipping containers, and it’s supposed to be the first of multiple other, bigger buildings made from the containers.
According to the Free Press, the model should be finished in June, when people will be able to walk through it.
The project seeks a way to use the recycled shipping containers to build new housing.
In 2013, it was announced that construction was supposed to begin in January 2014 on a 4,400-square-foot office building made out of shipping containers at the site.
Plans seem to have shifted slightly, though the company has changed things up multiple times since plans first began to circulate in 2008.
Two years ago, Three Squared officials said the company had $300 million in potential projects in the works for the next two to three years and was applying for patents on its construction system.
Three Squared also had plans to build a 20-unit residential building on Rosa Parks Boulevard, and another Corktown residential unit.
In 2013, Three Squared CEO Leslie Horn said demand for the shipping-container buildings was strong. There was already a waiting list of 20 names for residential units at its Corktown buildings.
“As the city increases its density in the greater downtown area we want to be a great part of that,” Horn said in 2013. “We hope to supplement what Dan Gilbert and Sue Mosey are doing.”
