A four-unit condo building planned in Shaw is going to be built with some unconventional materials.

The Travis Price-designed building at 1512 6th St NW will consist of 12 shipping containers, six 40-foot-long containers in the front and six 20-foot containers in the back, Urban Turf reports.

Rob Carter is developing the project, which will include four two-bathroom, two-bedroom units and is slated to be completed in December 2017.

Travis tells Bisnow he didn't want to see the hundreds of thousands of steel containers sitting around the country's ports go to waste, so he found a way to use them in architecture.

"They're a wonderful building module," Travis says. "We're getting a much higher-quality product and it's a much faster and less expensive way to build."

Travis has designed apartments with shipping containers before, including one in Rosedale that was rejected by the Department of Housing and Community Development. [UT]