Plywood is a modern, sophisticated material that doesn’t look high-tech at all. That’s probably why, when you think about 20th Century furniture designs that are classic and likable, many of them are made of plywood.
One thinks, for example, of the Finnish master Alvar Aalto and his sensuously curving armchair. Then there were Charles and Ray Eames, the geniuses of California Modernism, who used materials and processes perfected during World War II to achieve complex sculptural shapes. And the Danish architect Arne Jacobsen applied some of the Eameses’ lessons to create chairs that, while they sometimes pushed the plywood beyond its structural capabilities, have a lot of personality nonetheless.
All these designs depended on bending the material to give it both formal interest and strength. By such a measure, the Puzzle series of plywood furniture designed by San Francisco designer David Kawecki seems like a big step backward. Every surface in it is flat.
And in contrast to the fluidity and seamlessness of the earlier classics, these chairs, tables, chests and lamps are, quite aggressively, assemblies of flat pieces of stained birch plywood. They were introduced three years ago, and the line recently has been expanded and relaunched in a new palette of lighter-colored stains.
For me, they evoke not puzzles but rather those kits that promise you can build your own Taj Mahal in an afternoon, which I generally reduce to a twisted heap of cardboard within half an hour.
The technology that shapes this furniture is not bending but cutting. They are among the only pieces I have seen to take advantage of the computer-driven laser saws, which allow precise, uniform cutting of a complex design.
When I first learned of this technology, I thought its potential was that it translates an artist’s or designer’s drawing into a producible item, without any of the usual intermediate steps of engineering, machining and the like. And I thought the technology’s danger lay in the way it invites the designer to be effortlessly over-elaborate. That’s what earlier mechanical innovations did during the 19th Century.
Deceiving sturdiness
The Puzzle series follows another course. The laser makes it possible to cut its many slots, which are used mostly as assembly points but also as ornament. The uniformity of the cutting means that you can rely on every slot and every tab to be in precisely the same place so the furniture can be assembled solidly.
The furniture is shipped flat, for assembly by the buyer, or more likely the retailer. The furniture is more expensive than the kind most buyers would want to build themselves, and you wouldn’t want to do any damage to the stained, birch plywood finishes. Still, the construction of most of the pieces is straightforward, and some people might want to disassemble them when they move.
But it is not the technology that has made this furniture quite successful during the last couple of years. One reason is that the forms are graceful despite their flatness, and the pieces are striking, yet compact. Perhaps more important though, is the solidity of the pieces that contradicts their appearance.
