Ply-curious

The History

In the days of Pharaohs, plywood veneers were used to create coffins and surprisingly-intricate pieces of furniture. A sarcophagus, unearthed from a pyramid in more recent times, reveals an alabaster construction with an interior lining of plywood secured with wooden pegs. Legend has it too, that Cleopatra presented Julius Caesar with a beautifully inlaid plywood veneered table as a gift.

So, it’s fair to say plywood has been around a while. But it wasn’t until the industrial revolution that new machines and processes made industrial production of plywood possible for the first time.

In 1797, Englishman Samuel Bentham built a machine for producing wood veneer and applied for a patent. A few decades later, Michael Thonet – the furniture pioneer responsible for birthing possibly the most iconic of cafe chairs – began working with plywood but switched to bentwood, where he made his name. At the same time, plywood became a regular feature of US-produced pianos and soon after, moulded plywood became the most common form of the material used in furniture design.

Plywood’s affordability and strength also made it perfect for use in transport. In 1867 the American Institute Fair in New York exhibited a 107-foot long prototype elevated railway, a spectacle made entirely from moulded plywood that transported 75,000 people propelled by large fans. Plywood boards were also produced en masse for Ernest Shackleton's 1907-09 Antarctic expedition: 2,500 plywood packing cases were used to carry provisions and equipment. It was also used in cars and planes, where it is still used to this day. But plywood’s popularity and affordability put it in the firing line as well. In his novel Our Mutual Friend, published in 1865, Charles Dickens invented a nouveaux-riche couple called Mr and Mrs Veneering whose house was “spick and span” but where the new furniture “smelt a little too much of the workshop and was a trifle sticky”.

Reputational rehabilitation arrived later in the 1920s as modernist architects and designers began working with plywood – it fitted their ideology of affordable, democratic design. At the Bauhaus, founder Walter Gropius and later Marcel Breuer were in charge of the wood workshop, with Breuer’s experiments in plywood including the Short Chair (1936), which was a direct translation of his famous steel and aluminium chairs of the time. Around the same time in Finland, architects Alvar and Aino Aalto began experimenting with moulded plywood and created the very first moulded plywood chair to be supported by a cantilevered plywood frame: the Paimio chair (1932). Both the Paimio chair and the Paimio sanatorium building, which was designed for tuberculosis sufferers, were made with Finnish birch, a material still used to make much of the world’s plywood to this day.

Design powerhouse couple Charles and Ray Eames, then brought their star power to plywood in the mid-20th century. While Charles served in the US Army during World War II, the couple started experimenting with moulding plywood using a specially-made machine, making leg splints, arm splints, and stretchers for carrying injured soldiers. After the war, they used what they had learnt about plywood to develop furniture, honing and perfecting the technology. From 1946, Herman Miller began making the Eames Moulded Plywood Chairs and later, the Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman (1956) with its moulded plywood base and leather upholstered seat. Originally, the armchair and ottoman set was designed as a birthday gift for close friend and renowned filmmaker, Billy Wilder but since then it has become one of the most coveted and iconic design pieces of all time.

The Making

Interestingly, the basic process for making plywood has not changed since the 19th century. Sure, automated machines make for faster and more efficient production, but as before, the harvested logs are given a bath before being debarked, cut to size, and then peeled into long ribbons of veneers1. These veneers are then cut, scanned for imperfections, dried, glued together, pressed, and finally, the resulting plywood boards are cut to shape. It is this fabrication process – the peeling, layering and glueing – that means a single tree transformed into plywood results in significantly more material and significantly less wastage than one machined for solid wood. And this is one of the reasons plywood is hailed as being sustainable. Just how sustainable it is depends on the type of timber used to make it, but Birch trees, European Poplar trees and Bamboo are all fast growing and it’s these species that are typically harvested to make some of the most popular varieties of plywood products. The once toxic adhesives used in plywood have also dramatically improved to make them safer and more environmentally friendly.

The Designing

Like many designers before him, Jean Verville from Jean Verville Architects in Montréal Canada was attracted to plywood as a way to experiment with new forms. Verville chose plywood to completely line the interiors of a Montreal cottage in an expression of unifying monomateriality. The home that has resulted is stunning in its material sameness, creating the effect of living in a work of art. The material is also accessible, economical and sustainable, says Jean. “Living in a sculpture is a radical gesture to delete domestic codes,” he says. Small moments where the plywood sameness breaks – due to openings, slits or moments where the material turns a corner – add to the sense that this is a considered, intentional work of creativity, not just a functional solution.

Another interior uses plywood to make a living space more liveable, while also being an affordable solution. Designed by architect Matthieu Torres in the Belleville neighbourhood of Paris for himself and his wife, the plywood insertions transformed a tiny apartment with three rooms, no toilet or shower and low ceilings into a light-filled home with a mezzanine bed. After removing the ceilings (revealing extra space and exposed beams) and installing a skylight, a central bank of plywood was inserted. This unit functions as a wall, a passageway, a central piece of furniture, the bulk storage for the apartment, and the anchor for the ladder to and from the mezzanine bedroom. Plywood was also used for the kitchen (including the playful rangehood) and bathroom, creating a homogenous aesthetic that expands the sense of space within the small home.

The Evolution

The development of new fabrication methods in plywood has also enabled it to be used in completely new ways. In Melbourne, an architecture duo has used plywood not just in the interiors of a new home but for the roof as well. Architects Paul Loh and David Leggett from LLDS run an architecture studio and a fabrication workshop. The design and construction of Paul’s house in Northcote, Melbourne, gave the pair the opportunity to bring both aspects of the business together, transforming an old car park into a two-bedroom home with a green roof garden. Several features of Northcote House were constructed with birch plywood, including the roof beams, deck and skylights, and a sinuous curving internal staircase and shelf wall with in-built furniture and storage. The plywood elements were fabricated using CNC technology and assembled at their workshop (Power to Make) in Preston, five kilometres from the house.

Having their own fabrication workshop also helped David and Paul to push the boundaries when designing the home. This level of innovation, requiring advanced engineering and testing, was only possible because it was Paul’s own. Working with engineering partners, Paul and David spent years working on the roof design, eventually creating a roof that could take two tonnes of weight. “The roof is one of the more significant and innovative parts of the project,” says Paul. “[Our] test shows that it actually breaks at about six tonnes so it effectively doubled the level of efficiency.”

Jem Selig Freeman and Laura Woodward from Like Butter are just as obsessive about testing the limits of plywood. He, an industrial designer, and she, a sculptor: the pair are based in Castlemaine, a town just north of Melbourne. After buying a plasma cutter, first to create works in steel, they then switched to plywood and have never looked back. Their first product was a set of shelves that Laura designed for her art books. After that, they started making plywood stackable timber crates, which they sold cheaply to their friends before their customer base ballooned. From there, they expanded the business, creating the flat pack Clip Crate, then more modular pieces.

Now starting to distribute in the UK, and with their products made under licence in the US, business is thriving. Their latest product, called KittaParts, is another modular shelving system made with plywood that is available in a mind-boggling array of configurations. A recent Instagram post shows Jem load-testing (something he does regularly in the name of R&D and entertainment) that a two-tier KittaParts can handle. Amazingly it stands firm under an 800 kilogram load placed carefully by a forklift, before finally succumbing under the “dynamic load” of being jumped on repeatedly and eventually ridden like a Space Hopper1 by Jem.

The Future

Plywood was the material of choice for London-based designer Sam Palmer from BLOND when creating the Peel chair, which is not only made from one piece of plywood and is stackable, but is also zero waste when joined by its sister product, the Offcut table. Taking inspiration from the natural phenomena of bark peeling from trees, as well as Palmer’s hero, modernist Marcel Breuer, Peel won BLOND its first furniture category Red Dot Award in 2023. “Peel’s design plays into the illusion that it is constructed from a singular sheet of formed plywood that has been peeled back and folded into shape.”

For Palmer, plywood is inspirational – he lists the work of post-war artist Donald Judd, architect Alvar Aalto and Bauhaus designer Marcel Breuer as classic examples in plywood, as well as more recent work, like the Serpentine Pavilion by Barkow Leibinger, whose undulating lines were built in plywood ribbons. “New technologies are expediting the process and considering the planet, but the innovation comes from the designers,” says Palmer.

Plywood is also used in such a wide array of applications, that it is ripe for upcycling. In Madrid, UPHouse has been constructed with interiors made with reclaimed plywood. Natalia Matesanz Ventura from CumuloLimbo Studio tells the story that in one of her early meetings with the clients at the apartment (while explaining that she wanted to use second-hand materials) Natalia saw a big box made of plywood. “I asked the client and it turned out that he received these plywood shipping crates containing old electronic equipment at his work, and they were throwing them away every day!”

Instead, she suggested the client keep these plywood boxes, which had some pieces measuring 80 by 120 cm and others 60 by 80 cm. In two months, he collected more than 90 pieces of plywood, which the architecture team prepared and used for the cladding in the new apartment. “We first separated the pieces, then removed each of the staples and cardboard that were stuck together,” explains Natalia. “The effect was so gorgeous; we kept the stamps on them. There weren’t two of them that were the same, but when all this diversity is put together on a wall suddenly it has a homogenous effect like leaves on a tree.”

From coffins and elaborate gifts to some of the most iconic furniture pieces and ambitious architectural projects of our age – plywood dominates. Its use in cheap applications may even make it seem unglamorous – a proposition Mr and Mrs Veneering would surely refute – and yet its versatility and adaptability (not to mention its surprising strength and affordability) serve to explain why it continues to be a material of choice for designers the world over.

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¹ This is a truly fascinating process to behold if you have not witnessed it. Imagine a very large carrot on a rotisserie with a very long and very good vegetable peeler fixed at its length. Then imagine the carrot turning on the rotisserie, the peeler doing its fine work and a long wide ribbon of carrot coming away. Or alternatively, seek out the excellent video ‘Manufacturing plywood boards: then and now’ on the Victoria and Albert Museum’s YouTube channel.

² A Space Hopper is a rubber inflated ball with protruding handles that was a wildly popular childrens’ toy in the 1980s. The original version was conceived and designed by Italian designer Aquilino Cosani in the 1960s after he watched a documentary about kangaroos and realised “…that children never look as happy as when they're jumping”. Originally branded the Pon-Pon (and later the Hop), other versions quickly appeared such as the Space Hopper, Hoppity Hop, Moon Hopper, Skippyball and the Sit-and-Bounce.