Like most people, I used to think of plywood as a strictly utilitarian building material. As kids, we used it to cobble together treehouses, or we’d lean a scrap of it over cinder blocks to make a bike jump. In our teenage years, we screwed thin sheets of it onto a lumber frame to make the curved faces for our skateboard ramps (which we promptly spray-painted with antiestablishment symbols; I wonder if real anarchists got in trouble for coming in late to dinner). Back then it never would have occurred to me that the finely shaped and artfully painted decks of our skateboards also were made of plywood.
Even when I worked as a carpenter I knew plywood only as subflooring, roof decking, and sides for concrete forms. And, of course, plywood is ideal for all those applications. But as this book shows, construction is just the beginning.
I can recall two discoveries that opened my eyes to the design possibilities of plywood. The first was a gallery space in Minneapolis that had every wall lined with full sheets of clear-coated maple panels. These were gapped about an inch apart and mounted with trimhead screws. Entering the room, I was entranced by the towering wood surfaces and the breadth of their luminous grained faces. And then, upon close inspection of the gaps, seeing the stratified core of the material: “Plywood! Yes! Why not?”
My other “plywood moment” was seeing one of Charles Eames’s molded plywood leg splints for the first time, in a small art exhibition where I could get close enough to touch it with my nose. Modernists of all stripes know this piece as a seminal work of design, engineering, and mass-production technique, but at the time I was unfamiliar with all that, and I was completely enthralled by the work and its conception. As the story goes, Eames was told by a doctor in 1941 that the metal splints used in the battlefields of Europe were too heavy and lacked sufficient means for strapping limbs. With considerable effort and innovation, the designer created a plywood version that was strong and lightweight, had plenty of holes for strapping (thanks in part to cutouts necessary for production), and worked equally well for both right and left legs. The U.S. government ultimately bought over 1,500 of them.
Perhaps what’s most remarkable about the Eames splint is its beauty. It is, in essence, a work of art in wood. And it had to be plywood; you certainly couldn’t carve 1,500 splints out of solid wood blocks (especially in wartime). Today you could easily make the splints with plastics or carbon fiber, but they still wouldn’t have the look and feel of real wood. That’s what makes plywood such a great and unique material. It’s a precisely machined, manufactured product that started life as a tiny seed in the ground–the perfect blend of nature and engineering.
This book features the creative work of dozens of design professionals, students, and enthusiasts (and at least one full-time writer: me), all of whom share a love of plywood and what you can do with it. These projects are built with ordinary shop tools and range in difficulty from downright easy to somewhat wood-workery. Not all of the pieces are made with plywood, or with plywood alone. Some call for MDF (medium-density fiberboard), some have glass or aluminum parts, and one particularly stylish work makes decorative use of construction-grade strandboard. In every case, you can rest assured that these designers know their materials, and you’ll be amazed at what you can create using readily available, off-the-shelf supplies.
If you’re a designer, woodworker, or experienced maker, I’m sure you’ll be inspired and entertained by many of the fresh ideas presented in these pages. And if you’re new to the shop or the drawing board, I hope this book or one of its projects becomes one of your own plywood moments.
—Philip Schmidt