I haven't been in John L. Johnston's home for five minutes before he invites me to stand on the furniture.
He gets up on a boot bench, and I look at him inquisitively. "Go ahead," the architect urges. "It's strong enough to hold a couple of people."
I take a tentative step up, not putting my full weight on top until I'm sure the bench won't collapse into an adjacent stairway.
It's not everyday you encounter a home interior made largely of cardboard.
The bench -- sheets of standard-grade cardboard glued together supporting a butcher-block top -- is decidedly uncollapsible. The piece of furniture, which was designed to hold shoes and boots, is part of Mr. Johnston's experiment in the functional use of the recyclable material, including plastic, in the home.
Looking down the 80-foot length of Mr. Johnston's home and workplace -- a reclaimed industrial warehouse at Richmond and Bathurst streets -- the alternative materials are everywhere.
Wall sections made of plastic attached to structural supports stand adjacent to corrugated ones, cardboard sheets replace table legs under butcher-block desks, and even the bed and a credenza have cardboard components. (The headboard of the bed is 11 sheets thick.)
The inevitable question arises: Why? After spending about $400,000 on the property three years ago, Mr. Johnston and his partner, James Rives, were looking for a cheaper way to furnish the empty space.
"We had to come up with a way of making the interior space that we could afford," Mr. Johnston says, "that we could construct ourselves, and that I could use as an experiment for my architecture."
In his work, Mr. Johnston likes to keep an eye on the environment. "I wanted to use a material that we weren't going to have to put in the dumpster, that we could recycle . . . things that aren't dangerous for the environment, things that can be reused."
With those concerns in mind, Mr. Johnston commandeered the raw materials he needed: 50 four- by eight-foot, standard-grade plastic sheets about an eighth of an inch thick, and 209 sheets of five-foot by 31/3-foot corrugated cardboard of about the same thickness. Along with the additional cost of glue, screws and the butcher block, the final total was a paltry $6,000.
The real cost for Mr. Johnston was in time. It took him eight months to put his home together. The credenza alone was a three-month project.
For a few hours each day, Mr. Johnston joined layers of cardboard together ("very carefully," he says) using non-toxic white glue until he had a thickness of seven sheets. Then, these parts were attached to form the sides and tops of the credenza.
The finished piece is sturdy enough to hold the couple's TV, stereo equipment and record collection with nary a structural creak.
As the experiment with the bench showed, cardboard in bunches can be as strong as any plank of wood. That's not a new discovery; modern furniture designers have been using the material for some time. Frank Gehry, the renowned architect behind the Art Gallery of Ontario redesign, pioneered the craft in the 1970s. (One of his chairs fetches more than $1,000 on-line.)
More recently, a cash-strapped software designer in Arizona filled his apartment with chairs, tables and a bed built from 300 FedEx boxes.
Japanese architect Shigeru Ban took a more macro approach to cardboard design when he built entire shelters for victims rendered homeless in earthquakes. Some of these projects even included waterproof and fire-resistant materials that made them more durable than your average cardboard box.
Mr. Johnston is quick to emphasize, however, that none of the unique elements of his house are structural, nor are they meant to be mere novelties like the FedEx furniture. Rather, "the cardboard and plastic is something we put in as a way of manipulating the space and the light" throughout the house.
To create the impression of rooms in the loft-styled space, sections of cardboard hang from the ceiling in many places to create distinct slopes. The lightweight folded pieces are fastened to the ceiling using metal joints.
After three years in his custom-built home, Mr. Johnston sees no noticeable deterioration in the materials due to such problems as mould.
The walls and ceiling pieces may not stand up for a hundred years, but they will last until the next interior renovation.