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There may be no greater symbol of globalization than the shipping container.

Manufactured in major exporting nations such as China and South Korea, these rusting steel hulks are literally stacked like poker chips on the shores of the import-dependent Western world.

But in an age that celebrates the raw as much as the refined, more and more designers are seeing beauty in the ruggedness of this industrial form.

"We want to glamorize the container," says Ada Tolla, co-founder of hot New York architecture firm LOT-EK, in a telephone interview.

Originally from Naples, Tolla and her partner, Giuseppe Lignano, are fascinated by the industrial landscape of North America. Their designs have used industrial castoffs from Boeing 747 fuselages to cement mixers, but they are best known for their container projects.

"We started working with them by chance in the early nineties," says Tolla, explaining that she and Lignano had discovered a stockpile of abandoned containers in New Jersey. "All those stacked containers felt like an urban environment. It was such a product of our time."

Perhaps the most famous LOT-EK design is the MDU (Mobile Dwelling Unit), which Tolla describes as "a mobile residence for an increasingly nomadic society." Still in prototype form, it is built from a single 320-square-foot shipping container with movable walls, like a high-concept Winnebago without wheels.

"We use objects that have architectural qualities but are not intended for architecture," Lignano says. "But it's not only about recycling the materials, it's also about the recycling of ideas. The shipping container is an amazing piece of engineering and nobody even knows who originally designed it."

LOT-EK used a dozen shipping containers for the interior of the Bohen Contemporary Art Foundation in New York's fashionable Meatpacking District. Inside the space, the containers slide along tracks and can be reconfigured to accommodate exhibitions of various shapes and sizes. In contrast to the white interior of the gallery, the containers are also an art installation unto themselves.

The company's biggest container project to date is the headquarters for Metal Management Inc., of Newark, N.J., which breaks ground this spring.

The building, which will house offices for the metal recycling company, will be constructed out of repurposed shipping containers linked together.

"They have a very clever CEO," Lignano says. "It's the perfect marriage of form and function."

While LOT-EK tends to splash a coat of bright paint over the containers they use in their projects, some designers see the form's rugged, weathered exterior as a selling point.

Take the Sauna Box, built by Toronto design collective Castor Canadensis. Constructed inside the eight-foot severed end of a steel container, this outdoor sauna recycles an industrial icon into a luxury item.

"When you close the door, it's an airtight rusty box," says metal smith Kelvin Goddard. "People seem to like rust -- there's an honesty to it."

Inside, however, there are hand-crafted cedar benches, a carved limestone sink and a custom wood-burning stove. Solar powered lights allow the structure to be completely self-contained.

The Castor boys have no interest in disguising the container and, in fact, revel in its raw aesthetic. "You stick it in the middle of the woods and it becomes an art object," says graphic designer Ryan Taylor, who with stone carver Brian Boucher forms the rest of the collective. "It's only the smokestack that makes it functional again."

"I started to build a wood-framed sauna at my farm," Boucher says. "But it didn't make sense. The shipping container is just a way cooler aesthetic -- and it'll last about 10,000 years."

The 1,500-kg. Sauna Box, which will be on public display at Toronto's Interior Design Show on Feb. 25 and 26 (http://www.interiordesignshow.com), needs virtually no site preparation and has minimal environmental impact.

At a retail cost of about $20,000, which Castor contends is about what you would pay for the same level of craftsmanship in a more traditional wooden structure, it's aimed at the affluent consumer who not only wants to sweat but also to make a statement.

"Brad Pitt is our target customer," Goddard says. "Do you know him?"

Along with the high-style explorations of shipping containers, world events have prompted some designers to look at their more prosaic and practical applications.

"In the wake of the tsunami, the Pakistani earthquake and Hurricane Katrina, there was obviously a tremendous need for emergency relief housing," says Barry Hersh, a teacher at the Stephen L. Newman Real Estate School at Baruch College in New York. "There are literally thousands of these containers stacked up in the port at Elizabeth, New Jersey, and they'll pretty much give them away."

Hersh became intrigued by the form when he saw footage of American Taliban fighter John Walker Lindh being held in a container at Camp Rhino in Afghanistan. "The U.S. Army uses them for everything," he says. "They're incredibly versatile and, obviously, already have a whole transportation network in place."

In 2003, Hersh teamed up with New York architecture firm FXFOWLE on a container-based plan for the redevelopment of an industrial area of Gloucester, Mass. Inspired by Gloucester's maritime heritage, the award-winning plan hinged on the use of refaced shipping containers as building blocks for affordable housing.

But the project failed to gain the support of the public and construction unions. Hersh says there's a stigma attached to using containers as housing. "People don't want to live in a steel box," he says. "And right now, the cost required to make them not look like a steel box is prohibitive."

Like the trend for polished concrete floors and exposed girders, industrial chic is still an aesthetic that speaks mostly to the converted. For example, when U.S. designer Adam Kalkin unveiled his high-tech version of a container house in December, he chose the chichi Florida art fair, Art Basel Miami as his venue.

Made from a single shipping container, Kalkin's Push-Button House (http://www.architectureandhygiene.com) has motorized walls that open like wings. In contrast to its industrial exterior, the house is filled with refined furnishings that are bolted to the floor and walls.

While Kalkin has no plans to actually produce the Push-Button House, he has a dozen orders for his Quik House, a three-bedroom prefab kit that uses five shipping containers. Depending on options like a stainless-steel kitchen, the Quik House costs between $150,000 and $175,000 (U.S.). Kalkin also has plans for a single-container house for around $75,000.

Kalkin's other container-based projects include a 4,000-square-foot summerhouse constructed in Maine that uses 12 orange-painted containers and a children's play centre in Russia. But if he seems to like the form, his interest appears to be more artistic than pragmatic.

"I'm not into the container per se," Kalkin told The New York Times. "It's what I can do with it emotionally. Transforming a commodity into poetry."