Office from Cardboard in Amsterdam

Dutch advertising agency Nothing  turned to retro-futuristic Dutch designer Joost van Bleiswijk and design director Alrik Koudenburg, who created a striking cardboard office out of next to nothing. Built entirely from super-versatile cardboard, the Amsterdam office is a large volume office space inside a white box apartment. Made using van Bleiswijk’s "no glue, no screw" technique, the concept illustrates the agency’s philosophy to perfection: “Nothing is about the power of ideas, how a single idea can transform nothing into something. Using a cheap throw-away material to build a unique and memorable work space, seemed a good way to materialize this thought.”

 

 

Entire office space by carefully cutting and folding sheets of 15 mm honeycomb cardboard. The area includes desks, tables, bookshelves, columns, stairs, and even rooms made out of the material. Each piece is structurally stable, and if for any reason a tabletop gets damaged, a new one is cheap and can be easily cut to size, replacing the old one.

Eindhoven Design Academy graduate Coen Danckmer Voordouw was involved in the design and the execution of the project — we’ve featured his work before in the form of his COOLS kit.

The office’s signature style is timeless and classic, and it was modeled after van Bleiswijk’s “no glue, no screw” design ethos, where the form follows function and only the most basic elements remain. Van Bleiswijk’s design work draws inspiration from historic industrial design objects that have been forgotten, like the writing desk, the standing clock, the hourglass, and even the chessboard. The end result is a sustainable, versatile and timeless body of work that will never go out of fashion.