Lowering the environmental impact of the construction industry means finding new materials to build with. In India, an architecture studio turned to an unlikely material to build a beautiful cafe: cardboard. Apart from the core, shell, and appliances in the cafe, everything has been made from cardboard, which is both a biodegradable and recyclable material. Walls, chairs, tables and even lampshades have all been sculpted from pieces of the corrugated material. To make the stylish curves that define many of the pieces of furniture within the cafe, the architects had to make precise cuts of the multi-layered cardboard, which slots together with other cardboard elements. As well as being an environmentally friendly material, it’s also a great insulating material that absorbs sound well in the noisy cafe environment. The Indian cafe isn’t the only one using cardboard as a building material. In Amsterdam, a design collective devised modular housing system that uses interlocking pieces of cardboard to form a house frame that can be assembled in under 24 hours.
This stylish cafe is made almost entirely out of cardboard
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