A City of Cardboard

Cardboardia /Kartonsk is an ongoing project from Sergey Korsakov and Victoria Novikova questioning the emergence of ‘state like’ rules and conditions in temporary cardboard structures. The 9th edition of Cardboardia was materialized this month at the city of Ulyanovsk, Russia. For four days, the Cardboardia team, international experts in the field of cardboard as volunteering participants from all over Russia, were realizing a fantasy cityscape made from cardboard only. A call for projects went out to architects and designers to participate.

The Rotterdam Academy of Architecture and Urban Design was represented by two students: Dennis Holten and Edgar Holstein, who presented a method to construct chairs from cardboard tubes and ropes titled ‘You Tube’. Their chair design came forth out of last year’s design exercise part of the lecture series ‘Foundations of Architecture‘  tutored in collaboration between Jeroen Visschers and myself.

The design exercise asked the students to translate the principles of ‘The Red Blue Chair’, originally designed in 1917 by Gerrit Rietveld, using design principles lent from contemporary design or architectural practice. The students Dennis Holten, Edgar Holstein and Rachella Sahtoe choose to use the Shigeru Ban paper tube system to re-build the Red Blue chair, incorporating both the essence of the original, rethought in Shigeru Ban tectonic concepts.

The ‘You Tube’ project was submitted as part of the first international architectural competition set up in  Cardboardia and was  organized by Moscow based architectural journalist and critic Maria Fadeeva. The competition focused on architectural ideas that materialized actual urban issues in cardboard. The selected participants proposed imaginary settings ranging from general – pragmatic issues as public furnishing to imaginary machineries and spatial cardboard statements such as a cardboard prison.

Experiencing Cardboardia is asking participants to accept a new kind of logic; Logic in a sense of rules, which are provided by Sergey Korsakov and applied to the territory of the cardboard settlement. At Saturday afternoon one could count more than 2,000 visitors and participants building cardboard structures, initiating demonstrations, selling cardboard flowers and getting married in a cardboard church. For myself, I found it amazing to experience the high degrees of audience participation, while as an outsider I could not figure out if this is a statement about obeying to non-sense rules or obeying to a rule inside a rule mechanism.

What is the validity of Cardboardia for students of architecture? In four days event the cardboard cityscape was full of life; permitting a high degree of participation and flexibility with no intentions to become concrete by any means. The non-sense logic reminds us of the early twentieth century art and design activist groups like the  Dada movement for example. If or how the input of Cardboardia project could be translated or imitated into architecture, is a question for future research.

Notes:

* M. Carpo and S. Benson. (2001) Architecture in the Age of Printing: Orality, Writing, Typography, and Printed Images in the History of Architectural Theory. New York: The MIT Press

All images are kindly supplied by Noa Haim, Dennis Holten and Edgar Holstein. All rights reserved by the authors.