One of the more striking uses of a shipping container anywhere in the world is in Delhi, where upcycled containers have been turned into neighbourhood health clinics.
What the project is
The clinics form part of the Delhi government’s Aam Aadmi Mohalla Clinic programme, which puts primary healthcare into smaller neighbourhoods rather than concentrating it in large hospitals. The container clinics were designed by the Indian practice Architecture Discipline, with support from Tata Power-DDL.
Steel salvaged from container yards in Delhi and Haryana is reworked into a single clinic unit holding an examination room, a reception and waiting area, a pharmacy reached from the outside, and a washroom. Each one is fitted out to handle routine health checks, testing and dispensing.
Why a container works here
The appeal is the same set of reasons a container works on a construction site in the UK. The structure is already strong, so it needs far less modification than building from scratch. Fabrication happens off site, which cuts build time to a fraction of conventional construction and produces much less waste. And when a unit is finished, it can be lifted and moved somewhere it is needed more.
In dense residential areas where there is no room for a permanent building, that combination is hard to beat.
The wider point
Projects like this are a reminder that a container is a building module rather than just a box. The same qualities that make a container useful for healthcare in Delhi are the ones that make portable cabins and welfare units work on sites across the UK, where a building is needed quickly, temporarily, or in a place a permanent structure could never go.
The Mohalla clinic project was reported in detail by Architectural Digest India.
