“I have two of my pieces at home,” says artist-designer Illya Goldman Gubin, who lives in Berlin. “They’re very tough, very usable. And when people find out what they’re made of, they make for good icebreakers. It’s a material I’ve really grown dedicated to”.
Indeed, Gubin’s works – art meets furniture design – are crumpled, creased and sometimes misshapen stools and benches superficially made from resin and fibreglass. But underneath those materials is cardboard – the type that, along with paper, accounts for 17 per cent of global waste.
“People think of cardboard as a banal material. Cardboard boxes are already everywhere in our homes, arriving daily through deliveries. I’m interested in rethinking something so familiar and overlooked – working with an element that already exists within our domestic space, but shifting its purpose,” explains Gubin. “Even seeing discarded boxes on the streets changed how I look at them. The crumpled, bent and torn forms become unexpectedly beautiful. I think we’re still finding out what we can do with cardboard.”
Designers have long dabbled with the material: Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry experimented with it to make his Easy Edges series of furniture – of which the Wiggle Chair is most famous – back in 1969. Now, given environmental pressures, designers are exploring cardboard again to diverse ends.
Quart de Poil, a French company, has used the techniques and principles of origami to create armchairs, sofas, bar stools and coffee tables from cardboard – with some of its pieces displayed in museums. Hungarian company Karton Art, meanwhile, uses the material to make wall systems for galleries. Cardborigami, from Los Angeles, uses the material to create pop-up emergency shelters, an idea also explored by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, who recently won the AIA Gold Medal for his pioneering use of renewable materials, cardboard included.
But cardboard is also being used in an area that is usually the preserve of noble materials – statement interior pieces. The R16 lamp by design studio Waarmakers from Amsterdam, for example, is made from its own packaging; while British designer Max Lamb has also experimented with waste cardboard to make a capsule furniture collection.
Designer Vadim Kibardin, likewise, produces high-end, made-to-order lighting and furniture by layering stacks of flattened cardboard of varying thicknesses in his Prague design studio. Last year, he drove home what he believes to be cardboard’s potential through a concept project as part of which he made a collection of trainers from two kinds of egg boxes. He’s currently working on new chairs made from the same material.
“Cardboard is a serious material for designing and creating unique objects, its sculptural quality and the ability to build volume layer by layer allowing for almost architectural forms,” says Kibardin. “Unfortunately, it’s also deeply associated with packaging, waste and short-term use, and that cultural bias makes it difficult for people to see it as a ‘serious’ material. In design, value is often tied to rarity or permanence, and cardboard challenges both of these ideas. Working in cardboard has involved overcoming a fair amount of scepticism.”
And yet, the functional appeal of cardboard is obvious. It is not only recyclable, but also strong – extremely so when corrugated. It is also lightweight – ideal for an increasingly mobile population, while also making international transportation cheaper.
It’s flexible, easy to cut and fold, and can easily be printed, scored or glued. Treated, it can offer a degree of water, dirt and fire-resistance. Untreated, it develops an appealing patina. Since it traps air, cardboard is naturally insulating and appealingly warm to the touch. And it’s affordable, so more easily replaceable once it shows signs of wear. Other base materials, such as plywood and concrete, have gone through a process of being reconsidered as quality. So, why not cardboard?
Ross Lovegrove, the product designer behind Dubai-based architecture practice Deond, agrees. When it came to creating the pavilion for Dubai Design Week in 2024, he chose cardboard – together with a chipboard floor – in part inspired by his enthusiasm for Apple’s iPhone packaging, “which only goes to show how cardboard can be engineered with extreme precision, how it doesn’t have to be this brown hippie stuff”.
Lovegrove argues that the naturalness of cardboard is especially important now as a “counter to the very ‘hard’ technologies that have invaded our lives”. Why not more children’s toys in cardboard, or maybe window blinds, he suggests. But that’s not to belie its potential at scale.
He points out that while cardboard’s perishability limits its use – “you wouldn’t want a cardboard hairdryer”, he notes – there’s no reason why the material cannot be used to make large-scale structures in consistently dry climates.
“It’s the very affordability of cardboard that allows you be more expressive,” Lovegrove says. “The pavilion wouldn’t have looked better in anodised aluminium at 10 times the cost. Using cardboard is also perhaps a message about how we perceive luxury, especially in the Middle East,” he adds.
Dutch company Wikkelhouse has adapted a packaging technology that wraps layers of cardboard around a mould, rather than folding sheets into shape, then adds a waterproof, breathable vinyl foil to create the components of an entire flat-packed cabin. These parts can be delivered to remote locations, assembled quickly on site, and just as easily disassembled and moved.
As the company has joked, scepticism about this use of cardboard can be allayed by telling prospective clients that the cabins are made using “a more efficient form of wood” – which they tend to be more relaxed about – and pointing out that this is, after all, precisely what cardboard is.
“But what will see cardboard embraced more in the home is a change of perception – a better understanding of how good the design, engineering and crafting around cardboard can be. When those are experienced, people tend to change their perceptions quickly,” argues Stefano Compagno, sales director for Italian cardboard lighting and furniture brand Mobili in Cartone. “Good design is about not just so-called luxury materials, but also the stories behind the materials. And cardboard is a material that communicates forward thinking.”
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