Cardboard Century

Restoring Fecundity Through Collective Unboxing

I want to build a cardboard world

Where decayed walls sagged and wet floors curled
Where people stared at me as my bedsheets unfurled

Cardboard bricks and mortar
Cardboard bars and tartare

All unboxed cardboards gather to supply
A temporary world where no waste can survive

All the creations I see
Built to set the messy world free

There’s nothing quite as temporary
As a new age known as the cardboard century

The Cardboard Century project seeks to criticise and in the process to also raise awareness of the wastefulness of contemporary commercialism with the focus on cardboard packaging waste as a main material of study.

The design proposal is driven by material research in exploring how unboxed cardboard’s biography can be re-written to contribute to environmental sustainability and soil fertility through creating an ever-changing cardboard landscape which serves as a wildlife reserve for local non-human species.

An urban landscape of commercial cardboard waste as a result of the contemporary unboxing phenomenon.

Rewriting the biographical life-cycle of unboxed cardboards, where its use as a packaging vessel is not at the end of its life but a new beginning.

A Glossary of Cardboard Applications in Architecture

A Cardboard Chunk Model

A Manual for Building with Cardboard Components

Safeguarding London’s 2997 brownfield sites through creating cardboard landscapes which will function as wildlife reserves targeted at non-humans to be employed as a generational means of cleansing the contaminated soils.

Through the process of ecological succession, local biodiversity will increase over the decades as the generations of cardboard architectures are left to naturally degrade.

The Labyrinth City

The Winged City

The Stratified City

Next Project: Limbo Odyssey