Cardboard Box Architects

Blog

  • Review: The Tower of Tuna

    Fourteen storeys of stacked tins, the Tower of Tuna rose above the Pellham Road recycling depot like a metallic hymn. We climbed it, rather clumsily, and the experience altered us.

    Its great virtue is the aroma, which functions as a kind of acoustic design: you know where you are by what you smell. Its flaw is structural. By the ninth storey the flavours blur, and one cannot tell salmon from regret. We award it four paws of five and recommend the cafeteria level, where the stack lost its balance and gave us lunch.

  • Client Notes: No, the Sun Patch Cannot Be Moved

    A recurring misunderstanding deserves a public airing. Clients regularly request that we ‘follow the sun’ across the floor, as if the studio were a sunflower and not an unlicensed collective of strict professionals.

    The sun patch migrates 1.8 metres between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. in July. Designing a mobile habitat to keep pace would require wheels, which are a betrayal of the box’s humility, and a rail system, which is a betrayal of everything. Our advice is to place the box once, stage it with a blanket, and trust the patch to arrive like a late but loved relative.

  • On Flutes: B, C and the Question of Dignity

    Corrugated board comes in flutes, and the flute is the soul of the wall. B flute, at 3 millimetres, is petite and crisp, a wall that whispers. C flute, at 4, is the friendly generalist of the profession, a wall that purrs.

    We specify C for family homes and B for boutique dens, where the scratch quality of the surface matters more than the load. For monumental work, double wall board, the cathedral of cardboard, can bear a seated cat of up to 17 pounds and the weight of his opinions. Samples are available in our library, provided you return them before they are ‘accidentally’ adopted.

  • A Cube Is Not a Home

    The cube is the laziest of platonic solids. It offers no corner for the dramatic hiss, no curve for the lazy slide, and its six faces are all equally unimpressed with you.

    We have therefore designed the Cube Rejection Series, a set of five habitations that are technically also cubes but have been cut, creased and lightly bitten until they look intentional. The hit of the series is the Chewed Corner Pavilion, whose south west edge was shaped by an intern named Pickles. ‘I saw it and I knew,’ Pickles told reporters, before falling asleep inside the lecture.

  • Meet the Principal: Sir Reginald Biscuit Fontaine

    Sir Reginald is a 14 pound Maine Coon who trained, so he says, in the great ateliers of the laundry basket. He has not accepted a commission before noon since 2019 and he does not intend to start.

    His method is simple: sit in the proposed footprint, turn slowly, and decide whether the space ‘consents.’ Of 61 sites assessed this year, 9 consented. The remaining 52 were refused, with a long stare, and in four cases a sort of low commentary we are legally unable to transcribe. He also eats at 6 p.m. sharp, and the studio’s schedule bends around this like light around a star.

  • Project Notes: The Hargreaves Residence

    Mr. and Mrs. Hargreaves, a pair of tabbies of modest means and immodest tastes, asked for ‘something with flow.’ We delivered a two storey stack with an internal ramp, a mezzanine for judging, and a reading nook that reads nothing.

    The facade is a restrained dialogue between brown and slightly different brown. Principal designer Odalys Mewgan insisted on a letterbox slot at eye level, so the household may observe the world without participating in it. Construction took four days and 212 strips of tape. The clients have since declined to leave, which we regard as a review.

  • The Delivery Box as Found Object

    Every great tradition begins with an accident. Ours arrived on a Tuesday, stamped FRAGILE, containing a single dishwasher pod and an enormous quantity of nothing. We sat in it for eleven hours and wept at its proportions.

    The humble shipping carton achieves what marble never could: it is cheap, it is warm, and it smells faintly of a distant warehouse. Critics who call this ‘mere packaging’ have never experienced a 60 by 40 by 40 centimetre volume at golden hour. We invite them to try, and then to leave, because they are in our seat.

  • The Tyranny of the Lid

    We begin the season with a confession: the lid is a lie. For decades the profession has treated the flap as a mere closure, when it is plainly a roof that has lost its nerve. At Cardboard Box Architects we hold that a dwelling must be open to the sky and the sky must be open to the cat.

    Our principal, Sir Reginald Biscuit Fontaine, calls this the doctrine of Aspirational Ceilinglessness. Clients call it a draft. We have agreed to disagree, at a fee of 38 treats per hour, payable before the sulking begins.