With Cardboard and Glue, Architecture Students Reimagine the Chair

A rocker designed by two Louisiana State U. students tied for second place in this year's Chair Affair. (Chronicle photographs by Lawrence Biemiller)

Washington — Maybe you never thought about buying cardboard furniture for your living room, not even after Frank Gehry came out with a line of it (his corrugated Wiggle Chair retails for $985, by the way, while his cardboard dinner table goes for — are you sitting? — $2,730). But it may be time to reconsider, to judge by the handsome chairs that architecture students entered in a biennial competition known as the Chair Affair.

The winning designs went on display Thursday morning at the National Building Museum. Two juries — one to make a first pass at the entries, the other to make the final selections — picked six winners from 170 submissions by more than 300 students at 49 institutions. Contest rules limited materials to what the industry calls “corrugated board” — the brown product out of which heavy-duty boxes are made — and glue. Designs were judged on their aesthetic quality, comfort, originality, and craftsmanship and details.

And although sustainability wasn't among the official evaluation criteria, many contestants emphasized it in descriptions of their submissions. The International Corrugated Packaging Foundation, which sponsored the Chair Affair along with the American Institute of Architecture Students, notes that more than 80 percent of corrugated cardboard is recycled, making it an ideal material for sustainable design.

The designer of the winning chair — Jessica Leung of Cuesta College, part of the San Luis Obisbo Community College District, in California — took an extra step toward sustainability by forswearing glue. Her chair is made of cardboard strips woven into what looks like a doughnut squashed on one side. “Strips go in both vertically and horizontally,” Ms. Leung says in describing the chair, which she says can easily accommodate forces from any direction. In the weaving process, she adds, the ends of the strips are “hidden and secured, giving the form a final touch of tidiness.” Ms. Leung notes that she suffers from back pain, and that she designed her chair to “liberate the end of your spine.”

Two entries tied for second place. One, by Winston Mi and Jessica Brown of the Rhode Island School of Design, is a two-chair set with classically simple forms — and the smaller looks as if it could be the cut-out interior of the larger. Made of laser-cut chair silhouettes glued together, the twin chairs are cleverly constructed so that if you peer down at the seat, you can see through the honeycomb interior of the cardboard to the floor. Mr. Yi and Ms. Brown note that the 60 sheets of cardboard in the chairs were donated by a developer who had used them to protect the floors of a building that was being painted, so the material was “covered in paint, footprints, and even cigarettes.”

The other second-place chair was the most sculptural of the entries, so elegant that you could easily imagine it on display in a museum. Created, with the help of three-dimensional-modeling software, by Sarah Clement and Michael Wallace, of Louisiana State University, the chair consists of laser-cut double-thickness cardboard shapes that fit together into a grid that resembles a turtle's shell. Blocks of fringed cardboard placed in the grid create a comfortable rocker.

Three honorable-mention winners are also on display. A multi-legged chair-table combination, by Brad Smith of Cuesta, was made with tightly rolled fluting — and without construction drawings, Mr. Smith says. An adjustable chair by four University of Oklahoma students — Keith Holman, Benjamin Shullaw, Neal Birchum, and Sean McDow — is perhaps the most conventional of the designs, and would look at home in any office cubicle. A design by Jonathan Coop, of California State University at Long Beach, is simplicity itself: Cardboard strips cut on angles are glued together in such a way that they form a comfortable easy chair. Unfortunately the glue did not hold up to Washington's summer humidity, leaving the chair lopsided for its media debut.