With some creativity and design aesthetic, cardboard box forts are taken to a whole new level.
Cardboard is becoming an eco-friendly material of choice for furniture design, and sustainable designers have put it to many uses. It is used both for chic contemporary cardboard thrones as well as cardboard cribs and doll cradles. Bringing cardboard interior design outside of the individual home and into the broader community, however, is Israeli designer Tali Buchler who designed an upcycled and cardboard-based lobby for Zichron Yaakov’s community center.
Cleverly titled “Outside the Box”, Buchler’s design consists of a modular furniture system made of recycled materials. The community center needed a waiting area for parents and kids in between activities, and Buchler designed an arrangement that is low-budget, functional, and stimulates everyone’s creative side.
“Outside the Box” includes a few different elements: a stage area with oversized cardboard box “building blocks”, a perforated wall where upcycled wine corks (a nod to Zichron Yaakov’s wine making tradition) can be used to create a pixelated image, and a living room where fabric-colored cardboard boxes can be assembled to make sofas and couches.
“Being an educational center,” Buchler writes, “it was important for me to inspire the community for green living, by using primarily recycled materials, showing a simple way to construct furniture as an alternative for buying.”
Almost all the materials in “Outside the Box” are upcycled. The cardboard boxes used in the building blocks and the living room furniture were all previously used, and the stage area was constructed with reused wooden shipping pallets. The wine corks for the pixel image wall were upcycled as well.
“Outside the box is a space that encourages people to explore and express their creativity instead of just passively sitting and waiting. It is a platform to express one’s imagination,” Buchler continues.
“It was created as an open ended dynamic system with the pieces and elements designed to prompt people using it to re-create the space each time they inhabit it. It is an ever-changing landscape determined by the moods and imagination of its users.”
:: Tali Buchler
Read more about cardboard furniture:
Krooom Makes Recycled and Recyclable Cardboard Furniture for Kids of All Ages
Sanserif Creatius Brings Recycled Cardboard Furniture to UAE
Green Lullaby Makes Recycled Dollhouses and Doll Cradles
Paper Carton Furniture is No Pulp Fiction
Author: Karen Chernick
Much to the disappointment of her Moroccan grandmother, Karen became a vegetarian at the age of seven because of a heartfelt respect for other forms of life. She also began her journey to understand her surroundings and her impact on the environment. She even starting an elementary school Ecology Club and an environmental newsletter in the 3rd grade. (The proceeds of the newsletter went to non-profit environmental organizations, of course.) She now studies in New York. Karen can be reached at karen (at) greenprophet (dot) com.
