Cardboard stool

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Cardboard stool (Hanover 2005)
Fold it up and take it with you (Hannover 2005)

A cardboard stool or church stool is a piece of cardboard furniture to sit on, which is used for quick and inexpensive seating in large halls, for example at the German Evangelical Church Congress and the Catholic Congress . It is a simple cuboid stool made of corrugated cardboard that can be put together and unfolded in a few simple steps.

advantages

Cardboard stools are easy to manufacture, transport and set up. They are light and inexpensive. Because of their shape, they are easy to assemble and stack. Turned over, cardboard stools can be used as storage containers. When printed, they are suitable as advertising space.

Construction

There are different constructions of cardboard stools. With regard to the mainly mobile use of the cardboard stool, one-piece and multi-piece constructions can be distinguished, which significantly influence the scope of assembly as well as transport and storage.

With a one-piece construction, the cardboard stools consist of a single piece of corrugated cardboard in which all surfaces and supporting parts that are important for stability are present. The quick assembly is done by simply squeezing and folding. Multi-part constructions usually consist of an outer box as well as support crosses or webs that can be plugged together separately, which are to be built into the outer box. These support crosses give the cardboard stool a significantly greater stability.

history

The idea of ​​using simple stools made of corrugated cardboard at church events came from Friedrich Karl Barth , the former head of the “Advice Center for the Design of Church Services and Other Community Events ” in Frankfurt am Main. Together with an organization team from the Evangelical Church Congress, he was faced with the problem of providing adequate seating for the “liturgical night”. Since an attempt was made to implement a new type of room concept, it was not possible to fall back on conventional seating because this did not guarantee the required flexibility in the room design. The attempt to use air mattresses and beer crates as seating for this turned out to be unsatisfactory.

Based on this experience, Barth developed the design of the first cardboard stool. This idea was first implemented at the 1975 Kirchentag in Frankfurt. The first 2,500 cardboard stools were delivered by the “Stabernack” company for the “liturgical night” and were very popular right from the start. The simple cardboard stools, flexible in their use, were increasingly used at major church events from 1975 onwards.

Although Friedrich Karl Barth and the Protestant Church can rightly claim the invention of the cardboard stool, the granting of a patent was never sought or obtained. There was also no series production of the stool, since every cardboard packaging company can produce such stools at short notice, all that is required is the pattern.

Responsible for the distribution and the long-term use of the cardboard stool at Protestant church conventions is Heinz Steege , who was the organizer of the church convention from 1970 to 1998. Over the years he had around 750,000 such cardboard stools installed. The concept was convincing and so such cardboard stools were soon found in various other venues.

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