Performing Waste

Picture Frank Gehry, the renowned Canadian-American architect, at an early stage of his career. In the 1960s, Gehry was running a small but successful architectural practice. He also often engaged with projects that did not offer the creative outlet that he was looking for. One day, as John Scanlan vividly recounts in his Idea of Waste , Gehry wanted to test a design idea quickly, employing his preferred method of putting several scale models together from cardboard, commonly regarded at the time as packing material for things of value yet having no value of its own. At that moment, Gehry understood that cardboard, when glued together in layers, would make a strong production material suitable for inexpensive stools and chairs for daily use. As Scanlan writes: “And so, from this typically throwaway packing material he began to see new possibilities for furthering the use of cardboard, transforming it into novel forms” ( 2025 : 149). Even more, while designing his cardboard furniture, Gehry established the principle of upending traditional aesthetic norms that led to his fame: “[t]he principle of using materials of negligible value for something other than what they had been intended” ( Scanlan, 2025 : 150).