Formful Wood. Explorative Furniture

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
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