Quick to offset, budgetable, and movable.

When architect Akash Dudhe hears a requirement like the one he was pitched by a client six years back, his ears perk up with one solution: shipping containers. The building material, he reasons, checks all three boxes.

Ever since 2014, when he started his Mumbai-based firm, ‘SAGI Architects’, Akash has wielded his imaginative palette in the direction of using scrap metal as a premise for construction. And, shipping containers, the metal boxes used to transport goods, make an aesthetic argument for the tremendous potential that scrap holds.

The project he was pitched six years ago was a vocational learning centre in Aurangabad commissioned by ‘Pratham’, an NGO championing educational equity in India. There were two reasons Akash toyed with the said material — the land was leased, which meant that, should it demand, the project would have to move base in a few years; the other reason was intrepidity.

Metal as a building alternative was nascent in India, and Akash was keen to push the envelope. Within four months, the project transitioned from a concept note to being fully operational.

For most of the year, Aurangabad is dry and hot. Nature has coloured the landscape in shades of brown. But the Pratham vocational training centre subverts the setting with its kaleidoscopic exteriors that mimic the creativity burgeoning within, where workshops and skill training are held. The centre is architecturally succinct — it sits on a 1,500-square-foot area of land — and the shipping containers lend it a kind of nomadism.

As Rajesh Narayan Thokale, who heads the vocational arm at Pratham, also a civil engineer by profession, shares, “We liked the idea of building with shipping containers, considering we could........

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