Positioned on the ground floor overlooking the street corner, the community room opens directly onto a landscaped patio providing sidewalk activation. The compact building was designed with a focus on exterior stairways connecting a variety of open spaces at various levels including the ground floor tranquility garden, backyard, and rooftop terrace. Leveraging the mild California climate, the open stairs at each end of the building, in conjunction with open corridors provide cross-ventilation and encourage tenant use to engage in a healthy lifestyle. California climate for common area circulation by placing the stairs outdoors, which also significantly increases active circulation.

Two 8’x20’ containers, combined make a 320 sf micro-unit. Each container costs about $3,500 and has been used to ship goods from Asia to the Port of Long Beach. The containers were sent to a fabricator, which modified them, installed the interiors, and then delivered them as finished modules back to Southern California, where they were installed by crane. Onsite, the modules were joined together, the systems (such as water and sewer) were connected, and the exteriors were finished.

Minimizing the overall quantity of material used in a building, especially high-embodied-carbon materials such as concrete, steel, and petrochemical-based insulation products, can significantly reduce the overall embodied carbon of a project. By reusing shipping containers, the project reduces 12.4 tons of CO2 emissions. However, if the project would have been fabricated locally, an additional 69.4 tons of CO2 emissions could have been saved. Watts Works was one of three global case studies highlighting the business case for the circular building published by the World Business Organization of Sustainable Development in Geneva Switzerland and presented at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP 26) in Glasgow Scotland.