A cultural history of the shipping container as a crucible of
globalization and a cultural paradigm.
We live in a world organized around the container. Standardized twenty-
and forty-foot shipping containers carry material goods across oceans
and over land; provide shelter, office space, and storage capacity;
inspire films, novels, metaphors, and paradigms. Today, TEU (Twenty Foot
Equivalent Unit, the official measurement for shipping containers) has
become something like a global currency. A container ship, sailing under
the flag of one country but owned by a corporation headquartered in
another, carrying auto parts from Japan, frozen fish from Vietnam, and
rubber ducks from China, offers a vivid representation of the
increasing, world-is-flat globalization of the international economy. In
The Container Principle, Alexander Klose investigates the principle of
the container and its effect on the way we live and think.
Klose explores a series of "container situations" in their historical,
political, and cultural contexts. He examines the container as a time
capsule, sometimes breaking loose and washing up onshore to display an
inventory of artifacts of our culture. He explains the "Matryoshka
principle," explores the history of land-water transport, and charts the
three phases of container history. He examines the rise of logistics,
the containerization of computing in the form of modularization and
standardization, the architecture of container-like housing (citing both
Le Corbusier and Malvina Reynolds's "Little Boxes"), and a range of
artistic projects inspired by containers. Containerization, spreading
from physical storage to organizational metaphors, Klose argues, signals
a change in the fundamental order of thinking and things. It has become
a principle.
