Cardboard Cafe

The cardboard cafe is an outdoor installation made of entirely of corrugated cardboard, and at the end of it’s life will be recycled into a new product packaging.

The cardboard cafe was built with a combination of digital and manual fabrication techniques. Many of the tools and fastening systems are borrowed directly from industrial packaging applications.

The cardboard cafe is constructed of 410 cardboard boxes which were aggregated into an artificial landscape that incorporated seating, lounging and greenery.

The boxes tessellated in plan and contoured in section. The tessellated box pattern compresses and expands to dynamically adapt to different programmatic uses.

Denser areas create opportunities for sitting. Expanded areas are inserted with clusters of planted towers, creating a second topographic layer.

The branching plan encloses nooks and spaces for sitting and lounging, while remaining open to the surrounding flow of pedestrian movement.

The cardboard towers’ perforated leaf patterns and live plantings create a vertical flourish above the primarily horizontal, topographical aggregation of cardboard boxes.

The cardboard cafe creates an informal outdoor lounge area, in a busy pedestrian court.