Cardboard

About

Cardboard is thick paper board, and its most familiar form, corrugated board, sandwiches a wavy fluted layer between flat sheets for strength with very little weight. Developed for packaging in the 1870s, it became the material of boxes everywhere, which gives it associations of transport, cheapness and impermanence.

Artists took it up for exactly those qualities. Pablo Picasso's cardboard Guitar (1912) was among the first constructed sculptures, and Robert Rauschenberg's Cardboards of the early 1970s used flattened boxes as found material. Frank Gehry's Easy Edges furniture of the early 1970s showed that laminated corrugated board could make sturdy chairs, and the architect Shigeru Ban built the Cardboard Cathedral in Christchurch, New Zealand (2013), largely from paper tubes. Eva Jospin carves layered board into dense forest landscapes. Look for exposed flutes at cut edges, which reveal the structure of the material.