Cardboard Chair in a Weekend

I know that reposting old projects doesn't really count as content, but nothing else I'm doing at the moment is really that interesting, from a blogable perspective.

Anyway, people seem to like watching this video (ignore the audio, originally I had 'Montage' by DVDA, but Youtube forced me to replace it)
It's a time lapse of me building a (very robust) cardboard chair over the course of a weekend.

It was part of a one week project where groups of us were given an artist / project to study (in my case Enzo Mari's 'Autoprogettazione') and then produce an object an image and a drawing.

Make:Draw:Photo


The final product of Enzo Mari's project was a set of drawings, each one detailed how to very simply build a piece of furniture using pine planks from old pallets and a handfull of nails.

Project 1123 xQ - "autoprogettazione?", Enzo Mari

The idea was was to circumvent furniture manufacturers and give anyone the ability to construct their own furniture. Essentially a collection of open source furniture.


At the time I was living in a very small student house, I hadn't built up my own set of tools since leaving home and after not too much effort I had failed to find anyone who would give me old pallets.
So my reinterpretation of the project involved designing a chair that I could make, with a scalpel, glue and found cardboard.

My first steps involved experimenting with cardboard structures.

I found inspiration in the cardboard itself, the most common type of cardboard is corrugated. A thin wavy layer is sandwiched between two flat layers to produce a more rigid sheet.
I simply enlarged this structure.

 I was able to make elements that were strong in compression but had little to no tensile strength. So I looked for other cardboard structures and found a whole heap of strong cardboard tubes in our print room (from the large format printers).

So I decided on a rough shape for my chair (I procured some larger tubes from a carpet shop)  and began the arduous process of creating two massive corrugated panels.

The final thing was a beast, I'd over engineered it. The side panels could easily have been half as thick, and whilst the larger tubes were good and sturdy, they weren't too comfortable. I should have used lots of smaller tubes, in place of the 3 large ones.
But it did get used as a chair, and to this day I've yet to see a sturdier cardboard chair.


I've since discovered that IKEA uses a similar structure for it's cheaper furniture. It's simply a cardboard honeycomb sandwiched between two very thin bits of hardboard, which have the wood effect on.
If I could manufacture large corrugated sheets, they could be cut with a panel saw and I could make all sorts of cardboard furniture really easily.



The object was finished and the video fulfilled the photo part of the project.
I also very hurriedly put together an IKEA style construction manual for my drawing. Which, despite the rushed drawings and a wholly unhelpful step 6, looked pretty good on newsprint folded into a little booklet.

Unfortunately I had to leave the behemoth at the student house when I moved out, but I'm currently working on a light weight chair to cut out on my CNC machine, however my machine is so small that its going to end up being in about 100 pieces.

Concrete Couch

I covered this project in extensive 'how to' detail over at Instructables. So here I'll just give an overview and cover some different aspects.

This project started out as a competition created by the University of Brighton Architecture Society.

You can read more about the scope and intention of the project on the University's website. As well as everyone who worked on it.

I did enter the competition myself, but being a first year I only made it through one round of judging. The final design came from a third year and consisted of stacked concrete blocks to create modular seating. 

The actual build took place over the summer. I joined the build team and our first job was finalising the design.

We decide to add lugs to more securely seat one block on another. We took our inspiration from how Romans used to join columns together. However our early prototype looks more like a lego brick.

This is still one of my favourite things I've ever made from concrete.

On that note this was a prototype created by the other team (attempting to make a chair by filling a large bag with concrete).

It was a beautiful object, like a concrete pillow, impossibly smooth for something so hard. A quality which, unfortunately, they were unable to recreate in the full-sized chair.

From our prototype we adjusted the design to have four lugs on top and to make them square.

We made a mould out of plywood. The construction of the moulds is actually pretty complicated, gluing together strips of wood that are chamfered so that we created the right shape for the lugs. The Instructable has more on all that, but I quite liked these diagrams I put together.

This is the first brick we pulled out of the mould.

A little rough, but we checked it over, made another to make sure they fit together and finally decided to add some lugs to the sides to help them all lock together.

The lugs are centered, if we had offset them we would have been able to overlap the bricks when stacking (like with traditional brick laying, or LEGO) but we intentionally constrained it to direct stacking, in line with the original concept drawings.

Although, by this time, I felt we had taken ownership of the project, the original designer was unable to join the build so we'd collectively made all the development decisions. The identity of the bricks themselves was totally different (originally they had been conceived with holes so they would thread onto scaffold poles inserted in the ground)

Then it was into production mode.

We cut a stack of plywood on a table saw them began gluing all the panels together.

Eventually we had a pile of panels ready to be assembled into boxes.

We had enough moulds to produce 5 bricks at a time.

We tried a bunch of different techniques to make the blocks more interesting, one of the best was simply hot gluing leaves inside the mould before pouring.

Other techniques included burning the mould, and hot glueing lines inside.

We poured 5 blocks at a time. Over a period of a few weeks we came in, broke down the moulds, cleaned them, reassembled them and cast 5 more bricks, then left them 3-4 days to cure. This method is known as batch production and we were able to make around 30 bricks this way. 

The final job was hefting all the bricks down to the garden so we could set them up.

 As seating they're fine for up to about an hour, which is plenty of time for lunch or a quick break. 

This was a fun project and I learnt a lot. Concrete's a really fun material when you give it a chance, we didn't even scratch the surface of the cool finishes you can achieve.

One of the main lessons though was how many issues you have to deal with in 'live' projects, designing stuff is easy, but the number of revisions and compromises you have to make when thinking about actually making it are what end up informing the design more than anything else.