When you make a temporary  interior for company Nothing, that claims to start each commission from scratch (with nothing), what do you come up with? Designer Alrik Koudenburg went back to the beginning himself.  "Nothing, for me that's the cardboard you are going to build the first model out of." The Nothing company now works in a life size cardboard model that is the most hyped office interior online. After a first post on Nalden.net on March 9th, big blogs like Dexigner, Treehugger,  Gizmodo and Apartment Therapy followed. Extra publicity for the starting Nothing company! The online exposure brings Koudenburg and Nothing lots of phonecalls."No I will not build one for you. I like to start without knowledge, I need alienation which only happens the first time you do something."

When Koudenburg knew what concept to go with, he teamed up with No Screw, No Glue-guy Joost van Bleiswijk to create the actual interior. Joost (half of Kiki&Joost who starred at Milan's Salone in 2007) has developed the No Screw, No Glue construction system as a method that uses no second material. Cuts in flat boards can be shoved into each other to create a solid three dimensional object. The juxtaposing of the flat matrials creates a classical style, even when the material is cardboard. It's so strong that (with a litle help of wood) you can even build an extra level in the office. Van Bleiswijk explains how NSNG works in pictures at the end of this post at Dezeen.

"At first we did not succeed in cutting the cardboard honeycomb panels. Lasercutting made the cardboard burn, waterslicing ended up as, well, you can imagine. Eventually we found a company in Arnhem that has a cuttingplotter that actually makes the finest cuts you can imagine." There's some extra boards cut already, that are stored flat without occupying space. "If Nothing needs an extra table, or you've spilled your coffee once too often, they just shove in an new table."

Photo: Joachim Baan