Puma City: World’s First Large Scale Mobile Building

Create an 11,000 square foot building that contains a retail store, lounge, event space, and offices. And by the way, the building needs to be assembled and disassembled a number of times at different harbor sites around the world over the span of a year. That’s the challenge that NYC based architects LOT-EK faced when they began work on the Puma City project. The building is traveling around the world with the 70-foot long Puma sailing boat – il Mostro – which is competing in the 2008 Volvo Ocean Race.

Their solution started with using a material they are fond of and have lots of experience working with, shipping containers. The team fitted out 24 containers. But the issue of the building being assembled in a variety of countries presented the biggest challenges. It had to adhere to the international building code. The plug-in electrical and heating and air-conditioning needed to be adaptable to the region. And the assembly needed to be easy enough that crews around the world speaking different languages could assist.

Puma City’s next stop is at Boston harbor in early May 2009.