Plywood: a Mundane Material Gets Its Moment at MoMA

By Milena Damjanov
May 18, 2011

In this high-tech age, few of us consider plywood to be anything close to remarkable. Made from thin layers of pressed wood, this ubiquitous manufactured timber is found everywhere from construction-supply warehouses to the plywood furniture-packed mazes of IKEA.

But it turns out good old plywood was once a revolutionary material when it came to furniture design. One of the hallmarks of the mid-century era, it was used to construct now-iconic pieces such as the Eames Molded Plywood Lounge Chair and the Yanagi Butterfly stool.

Installation views of "Plywood: Material, Process, Form" at MoMA

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Photo Credit: Jason Mandella

To give this deceptively mundane material its due, New York's Museum of Modern Art has put on an exhibit called “Plywood: Material, Process, Form,” running though February of next year.

Juliet Kinchin, Curator of Modern Design at MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design, says the material was a natural pick for a show. “For a couple of generations of really major modernist designers and architects, plywood was a material of choice,” she said. “It really opened up such opportunities, both in terms of its expressive potential because it lends itself to these amazing, organic, compound curves, but also because it could be industrially produced and it’s relatively cheap to manufacture.”

Plywood Exhibition

Charles Eames (American, 1907-1978) and Ray Eames (American, 1912-1988). Lounge Chair. c. 1944. Bent plywood and steel rod, 28 3/4 x 30 1/8 x 30" (73 x 76.5 x 76.2 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the designers, 1973.

Plywood has been around for centuries. But it wasn’t until the introduction in the 1920s of particularly strong industrial presses, and the invention of new synthetic glues, that the plywood material began to attract attention from the likes of modernist furniture designers Gerald Summers of Britain and Alvar Aalto of Finland. Soon they and others such as U.S.-based Hungarian, Marcel Breuer, were making modern furniture that really explored plywood’s flexible nature. “What these designers did was make us aware of plywood as a material in its own right—not something that was cheap and to be hidden, but something that had a beauty of its own,” Modern Design Curator Juliet Kinchin said.

With the technical innovations that occurred during World War II, plywood became even more malleable, allowing furniture designers to continue to play with its potential for curves. One of the most remarkable modern furniture designs of that period came from Charles and Ray Eames, who built a complete bomber from plywood (the entire nose of a plane fills one section of MoMA’s gallery). “That experimentation allowed them to produce their iconic plywood furniture of the late ’40s and ’50s,” said MKinchin.

While the Eames’ chairs are featured prominently, the MoMA exhibit includes a wide range of pieces from around the world, among them a pair of plywood skis by Howard Head, the Paimio chair designed by Alvar Aalto for a Finnish sanatorium, and the elegant little plywood Butterfly stool by Sori Yanagi. Most come from the mid-century period, “when the forms were possibly at their most inventive,” said Juliet Kinchin.

Plywood Exhibition

left: Sori Yanagi (Japanese, born 1915). Butterfly Stools. 1956. Molded plywood and metal, 15 1/2 x 17 3/8 x 12 1/8" (39.4 x 44.1 x 30.8 cm). Manufactured by Tendo Co., Ltd., Tokyo. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the designer, 1958.

right: Gerald Summers (British, 1899-1967). Lounge Chair. 1934. Bent birch plywood with pigmented lacquer, 29 5/8 x 23 1/2 x 35" (75.2 x 59.7 x 88.9 cm). Manufactured by Makers of Simple Furniture, Ltd., London. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Barbara Jakobson Purchase Fund and Peter Norton Purchase Fund and Gift of Robert and Joyce Menschel, 2000.

As those who follow furniture design know, many of these plywood furniture pieces are still available today through retail companies like Design Within Reach and on eBay, where online auction sales of items in the "Home and Garden" category with the term "plywood" in the listing have doubled in the past month compared to approximately one year prior. Juliet Kinchin, for one, is not surprised about the lasting appeal of plywood furniture. “You look at these designs from the 1920s and they still have that freshness, that expressive quality that still looks really modern,” she said. “I think people will be surprised at how old some of those designs are because many of them have stayed in production—not least the Eames plywood chairs.”