Oy Huonekalu-ja Rakennustyötehdas Ab, Turku, Finland Bent plywood, bent laminated birch, and solid birch 26 x 23 3/4 x 34 1/2" (66 x 60.3 x 87.6 cm) Gift of Edgar Kaufmann, Jr. There are 9,565 design works online. There are 639 furniture and interiors online. Admired as much for its sculptural presence as for its comfort, the Paimio Chair is a tour de force in bentwood that seems to test the limits of plywood manufacturing. The chair's framework consists of two closed loops of laminated wood, forming arms, legs, and floor runners, between which rides the seat—a thin sheet of plywood tightly bent at both top and bottom into sinuous scrolls, giving it greater resiliency. Inspired by Marcel Breuer's tubular-steel Wassily Chair of 1927—28, Aalto chose, instead, native birch for its natural feel and insulating properties, and developed a more organic form.The Paimio Chair, the best-known piece of furniture designed by Aalto, is named for the town in southwestern Finland for which Aalto designed a tuberculosis sanatorium and all its furnishings.
Used in the patients' lounge, the angle of the back of this armchair was intended to help sitters breathe more easily.Aalto's bentwood furniture had a great influence on the American designers Charles and Ray Eames and the Finnish-born Eero Saarinen. In 1935 the Artek company was established in Finland to mass-produce and distribute wood furniture designed by Aalto and his wife, Aino. Most of their designs remain in production. from The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999 Licensing of MoMA images and videos is handled by Art Resource (North America) and Scala Archives (all other geographic locations). All requests should be addressed directly to those agencies, which supply high-resolution digital image files provided to them directly by the Museum. This record is a work in progress. Making beautiful, affordable design available to the masses was a central tenet of mid-century modernism—one that never would’ve been possible if not for the advent of a key material: plywood.
That plain little sandwich of lumber and glue—with its origins in ancient Egypt and its reinvention under the auspices of 20th-century military research—gave designers from Alvar Aalto to Charles and Ray Eames the raw material with which to shape some of the most iconic furniture of the past 100 years. Plywood: Material, Process, Form is an ongoing exhibit at New York MoMA that reveals the huge variety of forms designers managed to wring from this "modest but consummately modern material," as the show’s text says. What made plywood so special? First, it helps to understand what plywood is exactly. It’s three or more sheets of thin wood that are assembled, their grains at right angles to each other, then laminated with glue. The perpendicular arrangement of the grain makes plywood exceedingly difficult to break. At the same time, a machine can easily bend and shape the material, so it’s optimized for mass production. Designers exploited these qualities to make practical, economical objects for the home and beyond.
Arne Jacobsen designed a lightweight, stackable side chair—nicknamed the Ant Chair for its node-like body and skinny legs—that was originally used in a cafeteria. Charles and Ray Eames molded splints for injured servicemen, among many other products; their studio was the ne plus ultra of plywood experimentation. And Alvar Aalto’s gracefully curling Paimio Chair—which is widely admired for its sculptural shape—was actually developed for patients at a tuberculosis sanatorium in southwest Finland; using plywood, Aalto was able to customize the angle of the back to help sitters breathe more easily. For all its pragmatic appeal, there was something of the occult in the way people talked about plywood. Take the Eameses, who called their plywood-molding apparatus the "Kazam!" machine or the "magic box." Or Marcel Breuer who in 1943 proposed a plywood house that would appear to float in midair and would "weigh a third as much, cost only 70% as much and, knocked down for shipment, would occupy only 30% to 40% as much packing space" compared with standard prefab construction, he said.
(It was never built.) That sort of hyperbole might seem silly today, at a time when plywood is used for everything from skateboards to scaffolding. But it was hardly unique. Nowadays, instead of glue and lumber, we’re being sold on the supernatural powers of nanomaterials and carbon fiber. The promise is the same, it’s just the material that has changed. The irony is that the very design objects that showcased plywood’s greatest potential are beyond the reach of most people today. The Eames’s beloved molded plywood chair checks in at around $800. Aalto’s Paimio chair retails for a whopping $4,000. The humble material that was supposed to serve up affordable, beautiful design is still plenty beautiful. Never miss a story. I'd also like to receive special Fast Company offersZ Chair 01Chair 1936Chair ItyFurniture IsokonMetal FurnitureFurniture SeatingFurniture ChairsDesign FurnitureModern FurnitureForwardMolded Plywood Stacking Chairs for Isokon, 1936. The british were too traditional for metal furniture and requested he make them in wood instead.
An architect and designer, Alvar Aalto deserves an immense share of the credit for bringing Scandinavian modernism to a prominent place in the global arena. In both his buildings and in his furnishings — which range from chairs, tables and lighting to table- and glassware — Aalto’s sensitivity to the natural world and to organic forms and materials tempered the hardness of rationalist design. Relatively few Aalto buildings exist outside Finland. (Just four exist in the United States, and only one — the sinuous 1945 Baker House dormitory at M.I.T. — is easily visited.) International attention came to Aalto, whose surname translates to English as “wave,” primarily through his furniture. Instead of the tubular metal framing favored by the Bauhaus designers and Le Corbusier, Aalto insisted on wood. His aesthetic is best represented by the “Paimio chair,” developed in 1930 as part of his overall design of a Finnish tuberculosis sanatorium. Comfortable, yet light enough to be easily moved by patients, the chair’s frame is composed of two laminated birch loops;
the seat and back are formed from a single sheet of plywood that scrolls under at the headrest and beneath the knees, creating a sort of pillow effect. Aalto’s use of plywood had enormous influence on Charles Eames, Arne Jacobsen, Marcel Breuer and others who later came to the material. Concerned with keeping up standards of quality in the production of his designs, Aalto formed the still-extant company Artek in 1935, along with his wife, Aino Aalto, whose glass designs were made by the firm. In the latter medium, in 1936 the Aaltos together created the iconic, undulating “Savoy vase,” so-called for the luxe Helsinki restaurant for which the piece was designed. Artek also produced Aalto lighting designs, many of which — such as the “Angel’s Wing” floor lamp and the “Beehive” pendant — incorporate a signature Aalto detail: shades made of concentric enameled-metal rings graduated down in diameter. The effect of the technique is essential Alvar Aalto: at once precise, simple, and somehow poetic.