IF every object has its day, then the steel shipping

container may be the log cabin of the 21st century.

One winter morning in 1996, Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Ligano,

partners in the New York-based architecture firm LOT-EK,

left the city for an outing. Instead of driving to a ski

mountain or spa, they chose an unlikely destination, a port

in Elizabeth, N.J. There they walked among great ziggurats

of shipping containers that were stacked along the wharves.

What Ms. Tolla and Mr. Ligano saw in the industrial sprawl,

they said, was no less than a new kind of city. "You had

narrow streets and piazzas and incredible facades," Ms.

Tolla said. "It was the best architecture I had ever seen."

At the time, Mr. Ligano was less than convinced. Was it

really architecture?

"Yes," Ms. Tolla said. "For me it was like being in

Pompeii."

Since that day, Ms. Tolla, 38, and Mr. Ligano, 39, have

adopted the container as a design signature, using it along

with oil tanks, airplane fuselages and other industrial

castoffs. Their most recent project is an ingenious system

of movable containers for the Bohen Foundation, an

exhibition space that opened last month at 415 West 13th

Street (Ninth Avenue).

"We tend to use the most banal objects," Mr. Ligano said.

"It's all about the stuff around us that you see every

day."

LOT-EK (pronounced LOW-tech) is the most prominent of an

emerging school of architects using inexpensive recycled

containers as temporary or permanent homes, offices or

galleries. ( http://www.lot-ek.com )

Ms. Tolla and Mr. Ligano, childhood friends, grew up on the

same street in Naples. On their first visit to America, in

1989, they drove across the country, photographing

highways, gas tanks and malls along the way.

"In Italy, the burden of history is always with you," Ms.

Tolla said. "When we came here, it was like these doors

sprang open. Ah, there is also this modern world! We had

the realization that this was our true culture - these

colors, these shapes."

Ms. Tolla and Mr. Ligano returned to America the following

year and attended a postgraduate program at Columbia

University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and

Preservation. They have lived in New York ever since. Ms.

Tolla, whose companion is a photographer, had a baby in

August.

For Art Basel Miami Beach, an art fair held this month, 20

shipping containers were refurbished and converted into

galleries by a Basel architectural firm, Steinmann &

Schmid.

The containers were lined with white wooden walls and

positioned along the beach at Collins Park (not far from

the main exhibition at the Miami Beach Convention Center).

After the show closed, the containers were reused for their

initial purpose, transporting exhibition materials back to

Switzerland.

LOT-EK designed an exhibition for Art Basel, a video

lounge, which was installed at the Miami Public Library,

where viewers watched videos while lying down on a sloping

floor. "We call it a technological beach for image

bathing," Mr. Ligano said.

For designers with a weakness for industrial chic,

containers are hard to resist. They're a ubiquitous

byproduct of the global economy - available from Montana to

Mozambique - and endlessly recyclable. They stack as easily

as children's blocks and shift like Legos from truck to

ship to train. They come in an assortment of sizes and are

extremely durable. And they're inexpensive: a 40-foot-long,

8-foot-high container costs about $2,300.

"There's a kind of self-effacement in the attitude that not

everything needs to be designed from scratch," said Terence

Riley, chief curator of architecture and design at the

Museum of Modern Art in New York. "There's a thrifty and

environmental turn to the use of containers. It goes back

to the found object and the ad hoc-ism of the 1960's."

A New Jersey architect, Adam Kalkin, who has used

containers as instant rooms in several housing projects,

said he was attracted to containers for their enigmatic as

well as practical qualities.

"They have all of this veiled mystery," he said. "These

things have been sitting on ships all over the world,

carrying God knows what."

Mr. Kalkin used three stacked shipping containers in his

Collector's House, a $140,000 prototype for mass-produced

housing, built last year on the grounds of the Shelburne

Museum in Shelburne, Vt. Hope Alswang, president of the

museum, said that about 200,000 people had visited the

prototype. "Some were initially skeptical about the idea of

living in containers," she acknowledged. "But as they spent

some time inside it, they were transformed."

For a 4,000-square-foot vacation house in Brooklin, Me.,

Mr. Kalkin used 12 containers: two stacks of six each,

topped by a prefabricated roof. "People looked at us and

thought we were crazy," said Anne Adriance, an advertising

executive who owns the house with her husband, Matthew, a

business consultant. "But it's very intimate inside the

container rooms. It's cozy without being cloying."

The central living area of the house, which cost $500,000,

is an open, loftlike space. Five containers serve as

bedrooms, three as bathrooms. To relieve their monastic,

cell-like quality, Mr. Kalkin filled in opened ends of each

container with glass. "They have this total plastic

quality," he said, talking about the containers. "You just

take a welding torch and cut out a skylight or a window or

a door."

After initial complaints, the community has grown to accept

the unconventional structure, Ms. Adriance said. "It's so

far outside of people's context for `house' that they don't

have the emotional language to envision it. Their first

reaction is curiosity and confusion."

LOT-EK has pushed the container aesthetic to a new level of

sophistication at the Bohen Foundation, which asked the

architects to anticipate the needs of experimental artists.

We were looking for a firm that could reconceive the very

idea of the exhibition space and how it functions," said

Frederick B. Henry, president of the foundation.

Within the vast, 15,000-square-foot space, LOT-EK placed

eight bright red steel shipping containers, four of them

used as offices. One is a video lounge, another is a

conference room. Here and there, the corrugated metal has

been folded down like a flap to create desks or counters.

All the containers are mounted on steel rollers that slide

along tracks recessed a few inches into the concrete floor.

"As you move the containers you transform the space," Ms.

Tolla explained. "It's all about flexibility."

A set of overhead tracks, like those used in nearby

meatpacking plants, support generic white exhibit walls

that can be moved to create gallery enclosures. The result

is a kind of crazy railroad-switching yard. "There's a

sense of joy about working in such a nontraditional space,"

said Joan Weakley, Bohen's program director, who had been

working inside one of containers for the past two weeks.

"The possibilities are limitless."

Perhaps LOT-EK's most ambitious project to date is its

Mobile Dwelling Unit, a housing system inspired by a visit

that the partners made in 1999 to a container port in Red

Hook, Brooklyn, where they watched as a giant, insectlike

mechanism moved hundreds of containers from a ship to

waiting trucks.

Their dwelling unit is a self-contained space for living

and work, lined with built-in fixtures and furnishings made

of fiberglass, that is shipped as efficiently as any other

industrial container.

A prototype version of LOT-EK's Mobile Dwelling Unit is now

being fabricated and is to be part of a traveling

exhibition that starts at the Walker Art Center in

Minneapolis in June. "We are building it as a real

architectural product, not just a conceptual project," Ms.

Tolla said.

While container architecture might be another passing

design trend, it seems to be making at least some headway

into domestic reality. "You have to take a leap of faith,"

said Ms. Adriance, who will be moving into her container

house in Maine in a few weeks. "I am in the mood for it."