Containers might be hip now, but the architectural fascination with them dates back at least 50 years. The English critic and historian Reyner Banham wrote a polemical article in 1967 (“Flatscape With Containers”) about the emergent landscape of the container port, which he argued was simultaneously monumental and in flux. The container port was for him an analogue for the technologically advanced city, in which all pretense at stasis would be abolished. Around the same time, the futurologist and visionary Stewart Brand, founder of the countercultural magazine Whole Earth Catalog, rented a container for his personal library. He wrote about it in the 1994 cult book “How Buildings Learn," praising its adaptability and simplicity. For Brand it was the perfect form — a mass-produced, ready-made building open to interpretation by anyone with the nerve to do it. Banham and Brand helped make the container cool, plugging the shipping container into architecture’s enduring but never-quite-realized fascination with modularity: architecture as a giant game of Jenga.

Today’s containers, for the politically woke architect, indicate, among other things, a skeptical attitude toward capital. An important source here is the fascinating book and exhibition “Fish Story” by the American artist Allan Sekula, an exploration through photographs of the power of global capital, in which the shipping container is perhaps the key image. To invoke the shipping container here is to somehow reveal the truth about capital: it’s tough and unforgiving, and to use its imagery is to say that you get it.

But too often, invoking the container ends up just reiterating that brutality. To see what I mean, take a trip to what is probably the world capital of repurposed containers — Amsterdam. A 20-minute ferry ride on the IJ river, downstream from Central Station, takes you to the derelict shipyard of the former Nederlandsche Dok en Scheepsbouw Maatschappij, where there is an entire city of repurposed containers serving as bars, clubs, work spaces, any number of artists’ studios. It’s a dystopia, though it can be a sublime one, and half a dozen beers into your evening it is great fun. But then you’re forced to imagine it as home: There’s a student housing complex here made of stacked containers, so unremittingly bleak in its aspect that it makes you wonder whether the architects had humans in mind.

Or live humans anyway. Everyone remembers the episode in Season 2 of “The Wire” when Beadie Russell, a Port Authority police officer, discovers 13 female corpses in the Baltimore docklands. Perhaps the series’ most horrifying image, it makes the shipping container a literal tomb, showing up one of their key limitations: no air. It wasn’t artistic license on the part of the creators of “The Wire” either, as the countless human trafficking episodes of recent decades, especially in Europe, demonstrate. At the port of Calais, France, one of the main tasks of immigration officials for years has been checking containers for bodies, dead or alive. Perversely, responses to the migrant crises in Europe have involved more containers: Calais’s notorious “Jungle” housed migrants in containers before its demolition in 2016. Hungary’s government established a container camp in 2017, the choice of shelter clearly meant to deter rather than welcome.

And that is the problem. These container environments inadvertently perpetuate a sense of a Darwinian world in which only the tough survive. That brutality can be fun if it’s about creating a landscape for weekend partying; at Amsterdam’s shipyard, you can live out your “Mad Max" fantasies for 24 hours before heading back to the suburbs.