Who didn’t like building little houses out of old cardboard boxes as a child, with windows, doors and annexes, sometimes even whole semidetached houses. What had the charm of a funny cardboard hut back then was realized in work of Swiss precision and with a fantastic love of detail at the Designers’ Saturday in Langenthal on a large scale. Together with Antonia Henschel (Sign Kommunikation) and Knut Völzke (Leise Design) Stylepark created a room installation in the production hall of Création Baumann, this time for itself: a Stylepark world was created, using cardboard boxes.

The presentation reflected the variety of the services Stylepark offers, and the diversity of the fields in which it is active. In loose combination and with deliberate irregularity we created a room installation consisting of a wall, a central block and several seating elements – all made using individual cardboard boxes. Each one built upon the next, independent, but always closely connected to the other. A construction method which fittingly describes Stylepark. There are numerous, very different groups of activities and tasks which however are all interconnected, via an interdisciplinary design discourse which is managed in different formats. The about 800 individual elements of the installation consisted of conventional corrugated cardboard boxes. The choice of material made reference to the spatial context of the place of production. The boxes deliberately formed only the space, while representations of the content were shown on screens and in color coded display cases. The sections Online, Print, Event, Material and Consult shone out of the sea of boxes. Reference examples in the form of printed products, Material Editions and products from consulting projects were on show in display cases representing the individual sections. In addition there were several screens with impressions of past events and the Stylepark website, the product database and accompanying comments by the editorial team.

The cardboard boxes formed themselves into room dividers, so that a small lane appeared, through which visitors thronged. Not least thanks to the wonderful location at Création Baumann, which all the visitors to Designers’ Saturday passed by on their tour, the installation met with big enthusiasm and active interest. They were able to take a rest for as long as they liked on the cardboard benches, view the presentation at leisure, smell the herb garden or revive themselves with a “ganicwater”.

This project would never have seen the light of day without the commitment of two ingenious minds. Our special thanks go to Antonia Henschel, who as Art Director has a significant role in all Stylepark projects and who supported us this time once again with decisive conceptual ideas and graphic designs, and Knut Völzke, who with his studio Leise Design has been designing and realizing exhibition and trade fair projects for years, including for the Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin and The Design Annual, and once again decisively contributed to the success of this project with precision of content and sheer inexhaustible commitment.