Jones, Partners: Architecture has consistently received acclaim for their “critical manipulation of technology.” Case in point is the Program Container System (PRO/con), a prefab house assembled from standard 20-foot steel shipping containers that can be tailored to individual tastes and budgets. As described by Jones, Partners: Architecture, the PRO/con idea is “the perfect generic of multinational conglomeration.” As the world fills with excess shipping containers, this house smartly takes advantage of their inherent logics of storage, transport, structure, and skin.

The 20-foot International Standards Organization container is the basic module from which Jones’s radical house concept develops. In the PRO/con system, package house homeowners can lease or buy fully outfitted, program-specific containers that are then shipped to the building site and assembled according to the client’s needs and the architect’s design.

PRO/con combines the shipping container unit with a system of prefabricated steel-frame infill panels: floor panels with recycled-wood flooring; window panels; and roof panels. “The loose modularity of the PRO/con system,” says Wes Jones, “does not view the house as finished product but as a continuously negotiated collection of products and their ultimate relation to the ever-changing American family.”