The cardboard concoctions include four 20' x 20' pop-up room settings dubbed "Studio Apartments." The living room-sized boxes are furnished with such IKEA furniture as sofas, tables, chairs, lamps and rugs. Furnished boxes will pop up in Manhattan's Union Square, Brooklyn's Borough Hall plaza and Cadman Plaza, and, on June 13, the Brooklyn Public Library.

On display when the store opens next week will be large sculptures of the Brooklyn Bridge, Brooklyn water towers and the Empire State Building and Manhattan skyline, created by artist John Hobbs and made from more than 1,000 cardboard boxes. Some sculptures are more than 96 feet long and 21 feet tall. That's a lot of cardboard.

Deutsch New York created the campaign, with help from TH Outdoor to create the living room boxes.

Although the furniture in these pop-up rooms is actual furniture you can purchase from IKEA, the cardboard living area immediately reminded me of a project created a few years ago -- an apartment's worth of furniture, including bed, desk, kitchen table and couch, all made out of FedEx boxes. Of course, rather than embracing the free publicity of the furniture pictures posted online, FedEx fought to have the Web site FedExfurniture.com taken down. The site was briefly removed but reactivated after a ruling that the Web site had not committed trademark infringement.

As for the IKEA campaign, what will happen to the cardboard skyline once the campaign comes to a close? Better yet, how long will it take to recycle all that cardboard?