Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Puma City: World's First Large Scale Mobile Building



Create an 11,000 square foot building that contains a retail store, lounge, event space, and offices. And by the way, the building needs to be assembled and disassembled a number of times at different harbor sites around the world over the span of a year. That’s the challenge that NYC based architects LOT-EK faced when they began work on the Puma City project. The building is traveling around the world with the 70-foot long Puma sailing boat – il Mostro – which is competing in the 2008 Volvo Ocean Race.

Their solution started with using a material they are fond of and have lots of experience working with, shipping containers. The team fitted out 24 containers. But the issue of the building being assembled in a variety of countries presented the biggest challenges. It had to adhere to the international building code. The plug-in electrical and heating and air-conditioning needed to be adaptable to the region. And the assembly needed to be easy enough that crews around the world speaking different languages could assist.

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