Formful Wood. Explorative Furniture

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THE FORM AS AN IMPRINT OF AN IDEA FIGURE 1 US Patent, John Henry Belter, “Manufacturing <strong>Furniture</strong>,” 1858
MARIO RINKE itself in England as a metaphor for the cheap and deceptive. The French furnier of the 16th century still stood for adornment and meant covering a piece of wood with a nobler one. The development of plywood as we know it today is mainly the work of two people whose patents dominated the discourse in the USA in the 1850s and 1860s: Belter and Mayo. The cabinetmaker John Henry Belter (Johann Heinrich Belter), who immigrated from Germany, owned a furniture factory in New York and received numerous patents for machines and plywood techniques. Interestingly, in the documents of his ‘pressed-work’ there are even depictions of press molds and arrangements of the lamellas [→ FIGURE 1]. Belter only briefly names the essence of the well-known plywood, the gluing of thin layers of wood in layers, in order to then focus on the actual application: “giving increased beauty, strength, and other valuable qualities to what is termed ‘pressed-work’ furniture (…)”. 4 Belter used his technique to make the back of a chair. Until then, an object produced in this way had been produced flat or curved in only one direction because of its material characteristics. Belter produced a closed tubular shape from which he cut out the individual back segments. By means of the tubular shape, he shaped his curved chair backs: In the direction of the tubular shape, he bent the individual staves, in the tangential direction he pushed them together at slanted edges, similar to the wall of a barrel. This allowed him to easily achieve a double curvature, which provided greater stability and made the element lighter. For esthetic and technical reasons, the outermost layer was to be vertical and—to give the customer a good impression—made of rosewood. Similar to his patent for the rosewood bed 5 in 1856—for its frame he developed a circular, curved plywood surface—the specially shaped wooden component is a replica of an established shape yet using a new process. Plywood is therefore a practical, lighter and more compact substitute for a multi-part and multi-stage construction method. It is only applied to the part of the furniture whose geometric complexity normally meant a greater construction effort. In 1865 John K. Mayo’s patent, on the other hand, aimed at a general production of materials. 6 He first described the process of artificially joining the layers: “The invention consists in cementing or otherwise fastening together a number of these scales of sheets, with the grain of the successive pieces, or some of them, running crosswise or in diversely from that of the others (…).” The specific direction of the timber grains takes on a specific arrangement and the layers neutralize each other to a certain extent. For this new wood building material, the scale boards, he had specific forms and technical applications in mind, as he explains in a patent in 1868. 7 There, elements in the form of tubes or hollow boxes are depicted and described in order to be used as lightweight and particularly load-bearing bridge beams. Constructively, they refer to the contemporary wrought-iron components whose typical forms they adopt. But also the connection details, e. g. sleeve joints and, if necessary, rivets, are taken over. Scaled boards are produced as “improved material,” which produce different technical forms. Mayo’s collage-like drawing [→ FIGURE 2] thus stands for the principle of construction: The individual, the thin, narrow layers of wood, are transformed into a new, continuous mass whose plate-like form is determined by the industrially executed layering only. This continuous mass already has a new artificial shape, i.e. the straight plate, which is combined to form boxes or is constantly curved to the shape of a tube. The new nature of the material, its layering with its specific directions and the overall curvature, is laid out in the reorganization and fixation of the 177
Page 1 and 2: MARIO RINKE, FLORIAN HAUSWIRTH [EDS
Page 3 and 4: FORMFUL WOOD EXPLORATIVE FURNITURE
Page 5 and 6: Can there be a more enticing and ch
Page 7 and 8: A TEACHING PROJECT TRANSCENDS DISCI
Page 9 and 10: CHRISTOPH SCHINDLER HISTORY Histori
Page 11 and 12: FLORIAN HAUSWIRTH ing or CNC millin
Page 13 and 14: RAOUL DUBOIS [GALLERY] → 82 45
Page 15 and 16: MANON ZIMMERLI [GALLERY] → 96 55
Page 17 and 18: ILGHAR DADGOSTARI [GALLERY] → 112
Page 19 and 20: MELINA MICHAELIDES [GALLERY] → 12
Page 21 and 22: RAOUL DUBOIS [PROGRESS] ← 44 83
Page 23 and 24: MANON ZIMMERLI [PROGRESS] ← 54 97
Page 25 and 26: NICOLAS HARTER [PROGRESS] ← 60 10
Page 27 and 28: LEA BISSIG [PROGRESS] ← 70 115
Page 29 and 30: MERET TRÖSCH [PROGRESS] → 146 12
Page 31 and 32: OLEKSANDRA MEDVEDEVA [PROGRESS] →
Page 33 and 34: NATALIE AGREDA [GALLERY] ← 130 15
Page 35 and 36: URSINA HASLEBACHER [GALLERY] ← 13
Page 37: SEBASTIAN KRAFT the material does n
Page 41: NICOLAI DE GIER Technique prepares
Page 44 and 45: TABLE OF FIGURES NICOLAI DE GIER: T
Page 46: Design and construct a plywood seat

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