Thinking Inside The Box: Improving The Perception Of Visual Comfort In Shipping Container Houses

This study explores the limited interior physical dimensions of shipping containers houses while identifying some of the visual psychological concerns that those confined interior spaces create. It also discusses how architects can use visual perception tools to overcome the effects of shrunken spaces, improving the comfort level for occupants. Due to the lack of published material dealing with visual comfort in shipping container buildings, and because of the need for a bases of comparison as well as to deepen the readers understanding of confined spaces, the study explores several examples of small spaces while analyzing the dynamics of how occupants perceive those spaces through everyday use. The two general confined spaces researched were those of prisons and submarines.A large portion of the study introduces the case of the SC Retreat House project which was constructed in 2014 in Jintan, Jiangsu Province, China, the SC Retreat House utilized shipping containers along with the structural simplicity and limited physical spaces of those containers. The study then discusses how by applying visual perception tools, those spaces were redefined and transformed throughout the design process, thus creating functional interior spaces that were visually better suited to the needs of occupants and far more comfortable than the interior of a shipping container would usually afford.An interactive survey was carried out in the form of a short presentation and the application of a virtual reality model of the SC Retreat House, which helped to introduce subjects to the shipping container building. Participants were invited to build a VR head set (Google Cardboard) and use their own smart phones to transvers the virtual environment inside the SC Retreat House model. Using a well-defined questionnaire, researchers then mapped participants’visual comfort level as they moved around the virtual reality space and gathered useful information about their visual perception of the space.The survey data was then analyzed with the intention of discovering if the design of the SC Retreat House had successfully overcome the interior spatial limitations caused by its building materials, shipping containers. Comparisons were made to other small spaces as well as the cross references to particular studies dealing with the perception of visual space and to the psychological idea of personal space. Some speculations were also made on the future use of virtual reality in the architectural classroom and professional field.