IN THE MIDDLE of a courtyard strewn with industrial salvage, Kiki is struggling to tame three rusty steel drums, each the size of a large outdoor trash can. She stacks her cylindrical burdens awkwardly while a camera crew films her efforts. To complicate matters, an Alice in Wonderland-size wooden bowl separates each drum from the next, adding an extra layer of uncertainty. The resulting leaning tower is taller than the woman orchestrating it and probably weighs more than she does.

"You can just stroll around and wonder what the hell we're doing," Kiki hollers when she catches sight of me, standing at a respectful distance.

I'm not sure whether I've stumbled onto a movie set or am about to become a "don't" in an industrial safety video. Not to worry. If someone here should meet a tragic end, there's a 1971 Cadillac hearse standing by at the ready! Called the Carthedral, the menacing art car looks like a Gothic church immolated on top of an actual funeral car. Amid the flying buttresses, stained glass windows, and grinning gargoyles, a bumper sticker asks, "What if the hokey-pokey really is what it's all about?" Indeed.

Nearby, I spot a motorized perverted baby stroller. Power tools that drag race. A human-size hamster-wheel playa vehicle that's known, for obscure reasons, as the Fuck Machine. It's all just so much "kinetic" sculpture in this junkyard playground, where big boys and girls come to figure out new ways to blow things up, burn them down, and make them run around.

Take 27 20-by-8-foot shipping containers. Treat them as gigantic Lego-like building blocks, stacking them two high around a 5,000-square-foot yard. Presto – you have the Shipyard, a place where the detritus of international-seafaring commerce becomes artists studios.

Founded just last November in Berkeley's warehouse district, the Shipyard is now home to 22 artists who rent out the shipping containers for $150 to $175 a month to use as workshops and storage spaces. The inside of one contains the contents of an entire machine shop, including a welder, a drill press, a neon-glass maker, and a jug of a flammable liquid called Neptha. "It's mostly empty," Kiki attests.

Not surprisingly, the Shipyard is on the iffy side of the law.

The city of Berkeley recently shut off the art yard's power when it turned out that its permits weren't up-to-date. It seems that the last officially registered use of this property was as a boat shop, but that was years ago. While the permits get straightened out, the shipping containers can only be used for storage, and the electricity has to come from portable generators.

These vexing regulatory distractions have spawned a Web petition drive at theshipyard.org, which asks, "Shall the Shipyard be spared or shipwrecked?" So far more than 300 fans have asked that it be saved.

Jim Mason, the Shipyard's lunatic captain, estimates that it will take $15,000 to $30,000 to get the place up to the city's electric and earthquake codes. So the artists have staged a series of fantastical benefits, including, most recently, a power-tool drag race that drew hundreds and raised $800 for the cause. That's $800 if you don't count Jim's emergency room bills. He expended so much concern making sure no one else lost any fingers or toes at this controlled-mayhem event that he got a little roughed up himself.

But Jim assures me that the second-degree burns on his face, leg, and hand look worse than they actually are. The next benefit will feature drag races too, but rubber band-powered vehicles or paper airplanes will be the contestants. The details are still being debated.

There's something post-nuclear holocaust about the Shipyard, as if a handful of wily survivors had dragged potentially useful scraps from the Old World to this workshop for their new society. The carcass of a 10-foot satellite dish sits upended, awaiting further instructions. And five monster fans, once used to fight fires in mines, will soon be repurposed to shoot flames.

In the Shipyard it's sometimes hard to tell what's art and what's a half-baked plan. Take the giant wooden cable spools that lie scattered about, capsized on their sides. Planted in the center of each spool is a dying tree. And the contraptions are mounted on wheels. The concept: mobile workbenches, each with its own organic shade – but so far the "organic" part hasn't cooperated. Hopefully, the city of Berkeley will.