If you have a lot of small items, projects or papers to store, and an eye that is pained by visual busyness, I recommend a strategy used by designer Laura Handler and Andy Warhol:
Read MoreInterlocking Cardboard Disks for Building
As great admirers of the infinite possibilities of ordinary cardboard, we love British designer Torsten Sherwood‘s simplified single-component system that encourages instinctive building. Noook are colored, double-faced cardboard disks that slot together to create overlapping formations that can create unique structures. Inspired by Legos, Noook offer’s infinite possible combinations. Designed for children, we see it as a wonderful…
Read MoreA Cardboard Standing Desk to Buy or DIY
We recently came across another clever possibility in the realm of cardboard, one of our favorite materials, especially corrugated cardboard which is lightweight, durable, recyclable, and inexpensive: the cardboard standing desk. Recently a Kickstarter campaign, you can order one from Chairigami for $95, or copy the design analyzing the gif, below.
Read MoreRethinking the Cardboard Box: Rapid Packing Container
Two engineering students rethink the cardboard box, and come up with a truly innovative design.
Read Morefab cardboard prom dress
We SO love the crazy-imaginative prom dresses industrious students make to antidote and poke fun at over-the-top prom-ism. We’re adding this curiously-girlie-though-made-of-cardboard one to our collection that includes the divine… duct tape and phone book dress m&m wrapper dress (garbage is opportunity) fishs eddy’s spoon dress metal washer and attic insulation dress vision break: a…
Read Morecool, sturdy cardboard furniture to diy or buy
Recently on Unconsumption, we spotted these cool little cardboard benches made by A4A Design in Milan. The post mentioned that A4A has been a pioneer in designing cardboard furniture; that sent us looking for more, which we found at Inhabitat — a whole slideshow of them. Anaylizing A4A’s designs, we realized that much of their furniture is made…
Read Morecarved cardboard chair + the secret power of cardboard
We love this chair by monocomplex design studio because it illustrates an essential lesson about cardboard: when sheets of it are glued together they become an incredibly strong material, a homemade laminate that can be used like wood. Here, the designer glued together 127 pieces of cardboard (recycled boxes, not pristine sheets) until he had a big roughly-arm-chair-size…
Read Morecaine’s arcade: a miracle of cardboard, tape, imagination
(Video link here.) This morning, we found several emails from readers alerting us to this video that is flying around the internet like wildfire. It’s about 9-year-old Caine who devised an elaborate arcade out of cardboard, great quantities of packing tape, plastic toys – whatever he could find – over the course of a summer…
Read Mored-i-y cardboard stool/table
We were researching the idea of making cardboard prototypes of ideas we have for furniture when we stumbled upon a series of designs, with pictures of folded cardboard furniture at DesignBoom. They are easily copy-able and stimulate thinking of cardboard furniture possibilities. Our favorite is this lovely “folding chair”/stool/side table designed by Carine Imhof: “Kui-Kui is…
Read Mored-i-y corrugated cardboard room divider (after pistoletto)
We definitely have a thing for impermanent pop-up rooms within rooms and room dividers, mentally hacking all sorts of materials, tents, and scaffolding trying to fulfill our dream of a space that could be easily and instantly divisable. We also have a thing for cardboard. So when we stumbled on this photo of Michelangelo Pistoletto’s art…
Read More‘pop-up’ room redux: interlocking cardboard
Always on the lookout for more ideas for impermanent pop-up rooms within rooms, we were taken by a work by Zimoun, a sound artist/sculptor who builds different kinds of white noise into structures.We love his room of interlocking slabs of notched cardboard, made like a house of cards, and imagined building a smaller version that…
Read Morecardboard office + furniture (+ where to buy cardboard)
Tara Mann alerted us to Mashable’s slide show of unusual offices. We especially like this impromtu cardboard office designed by Paul Coudamy, who cleverly used corrugated cardboard as walls and shelves (more photos follow). Of course we instantly started hunting down that really thick cardboard that’s so perfect for making furniture like this chaise…
Read Moreps: how to transform a cardboard box
We wish every cardboard box we come across to look like this, which is, actually, an artwork by Hreinn Fridfinnsson. Being barbarians, we’d like to copy Fridfinnsson’s idea for our closet boxes…or, as an unexpected spin on a gift box: it would look ordinary and rather humdrum on the outside, but when the giftee pulls…
Read Morecardboard, crates + chairs as building materials
When we read that Centre Pompidou in Paris was offering a Cardboard Carton Workshop, we wanted to beam ourselves there, a la Star Trek, to see what more we could add to our overflowing file and minds about this wonderfully versatile material. We were stunned by a photo of an archway made of cardboard sheets combined…
Read Moreclipped-together shelving pt. 2: cardboard boxes
Pamela Hovland, who is our BEST scout, found this cardboard box shelving system on Etsy. It’s a variation of the clipped-together shelving idea we wrote about earlier. It is to our mind a brilliant use of an ordinary cardboard box (which we’re thinking, could even be painted with rubber paint…) It seems to be the…
Read Mored-i-y folding screen (thinking out loud in cardboard)
Atlas Industries, who makes gorgeous, furniture-like, fiercely expensive shelving and storage, sent us an announcement of a new product: a folding screen. We are always on the look-out for folding screen options to divide rooms and hide the stuff we don’t want to look at in our small space. The screen costs $2400 and we’d…
Read Morecouturier de cardboard: matthew sporzynski
Matthew Sporzynski whose impromptu gift I blogged about a few days ago, is an artist whose medium is paper. His business card reads: “Couturier de Cardboard”. Although Matthew’s work is published regularly in Real Simple, and he has made his unique creations for Estee Lauder, Ralph Lauren, and the Special Events department of The Museum of Modern…
Read Morehalloween inspiration: cardboard box as the empire state building
Designer Pamela Hovland sent this image of her son Henry’s costume, a family collaboration. It’s amazing what recycled cardboard boxes and some paint can become… Thanks Pamela!
Read MoreFor Those Freaked Out by The Stock Market’s Slide + Prophecies of DOOM (Revised)
As the stock market jitters wildly and the media speculates dire straits, we take comfort in this piece from Jeremy Siegel’s seminal book, Stocks for the Long Run, an essential reference for anyone wanting to understand investing. It’s the memo that brokerage firm Dean Witter issued to its clients on May 6, 1932 after stocks plummeted 85 percent from their 1929 high.
Read MoreA Blind Painter’s Lessons in Seeing (Sargy Mann)
When landscape artist Sargy Mann went totally blind in 2005, he assumed there were no options left. But since a blank canvas was stretched in his studio,and paints had been mixed, he thought, “I wonder would happen if I gave this a go?”
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