LORD NEIL BENJAMIN GIBSON DISCUSSES SHIPPING CONTAINER HOUSING EXAMPLE: SERVOTEL, HAITI

Inter Model Steel Building Units (ISBU), as identified by Lord Neil Benjamin Gibson, remain an ideal construct for housing options and are mong the strongest stationary structures in the world, composed of corten steel, able to withstand extensive environmental attacks such as hurricanes, tornados, typhoons and even earthquakes, making them uniquely durable, and capable of carrying 30 tons of cargo. The average shipping containers are 40 feet in length by 8 feet wide and 9.5 feet high.

Lord Neil Gibson and SFBBL AG through the SEED Foundation have been devising methods and implementation strategies to initiate solutions for resolving growing problems related to the impoverished and the homeless. ISBU structures, also known as shipping containers, continue to prove the most cost efficient, long term solution available today.

Since the 1960s, discarded containers have been used by the United States military as fully functioning, secure and mobile hospitals. Today, they are used for a variety of functions, from mobile to temporary to permanent housing.

Shortly after the earth quake in January 2010 in Haïti, a dire need arose to provide adequate shelters to the victims who lost their homes in the disaster. To assist with this process, a private hotel owner on the island chose to quickly have a 4 star hotel, called Servotel, built close to the national airport near the capital of Haïti, Port-au-Prince. The hotel was intended to house many international guests from the media and from NGO’s that visited the island to survey the disaster. Nearly all hotels on the island were either completely collapsed or unusable

A complete new hotel consisting of prefabricated hotel units was in less than 8 weeks designed and engineered. 72 rooms of each 4,8 x 5 m, complete with all furniture and equipment to the last detail. All rooms were designed and engineered based on European building standards. The large bathrooms fully tiled and provide high standard luxury with a bathtub, toilet, shower and sink. All rooms also have their own A/C system and digital door lock system.

The extra wide (4,8 m) design of the rooms give a very spacious look and feel, quite different from the standard hotel room width. These hotel rooms consist of the shipping container size modules that are transported separately but are connected on site. Travellers that stay in the hotel are unaware of any construction details and consistently surprised to learn the construction of their rooms came from fully finished prefabricated steel modules transformed into the gorgeous hotel building they stayed in.