A new pop-up hotel in Belgium travels around the city, using old shipping containers as hotel rooms.
The pop-up hotel designed by Sleeping Around, a new company from Belgium, doesn't have an address; you find your room by GPS. Right now, the hotel is overlooking a riverfront in Antwerp, and soon it will move on to a new location.
Why make a temporary hotel? In some cases, it can be a way to give travelers a way to experience a unique corner of a city without the ecological (or literal) footprint of a standard new building. For events, like music festivals, that bring hundreds or thousands of people to an area for just a few days, a pop-up hotel can provide an alternative place to stay.
Sleeping Around designed the hotel rooms from old shipping containers, which are often left behind in port cities when it's not profitable to send them back empty. The containers were outfitted with everything you'd expect to find in a modern hotel room, using sustainable design principles. It seems like a good way to reuse the boxes, though it's interesting to wonder how much energy went into retrofitting them (as Lloyd Alter writes on Treehugger, shipping container architecture doesn't always make sense).
Images courtesy of Sleeping Around.
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