CBC News Desk
We at Nordwerk Design created this news desk for the Edmonton Studio of the Canadian broadcaster CBC, fully made of engineered paperboard (Re-board®), helping CBC to shift over to more sustainable, lightweight solutions. The original design was provided by CBC and is a smaller version of the wooden desk already used for the show “Power & Politics”. We took the original geometry and modified it to work in Re-board®.
With sets for movies and TV switching over to sustainability more and more, this desk is great example for how even complex, rounded shapes can be made from cardboard easily; with high stability (the desk bears a tabletop weighting in at 211.6lbs/96kg), lower reliance on non-renewable resources like metal or plastic and a lower carbon footprint in both production and logistics.
The total weight of the desk without the tabletop is around 110lbs/50kg. Therefore, acrylic tabletops is almost twice as heavy as the desk itself.
On the technical side one of the challenges was to create a round, conical shape with no visible seams. In order to achieve it, we broke down the original geometry and recalculated all radiuses and arcs according to the requirements of 16mm Re-board. Another challenge was the weight of the 1-inch-thick acrylic tabletop, which weights in (including metal stand-offs) at 211.6lbs (96kg). Therefore, weight distribution with an internal support system was key to the integration of the top.
To produce the table, we used the Kongsberg VariAngle tool to its fullest potential since the angles between base, legs and top as well as the angles on the inside of the skirting all were different. The design also required non-standard angles between top/bottom plates and skirting to achieve a seamless look at the edges.
The geometry was redesigned so that all tilted parts only had at most one digit behind the decimal point to make production as seamless as possible (i.e., 11.2 degrees).
The desk was installed beginning of March 2025 and revisited after a 4-week test run at CBC Edmonton. No deformations due to the weight of the tabletop or the usage in the studio were detected.
