plywood

Swirly Cutouts in Wood Antidote and Amplify “Modern”

For years, I thought this image was of a fireplace mantle and admired it for the swirly cutouts that softened the usual rectangle while maintaining a curious modernity. It’s an image from my file of wooden things quietly embellished with swirls, loops, curls, scallops. They give me ideas for my trove of uncut plywood, as do these from Brancusi, Blossfeldt, Margaret Bourke-White.

Enrique Oliviera’s Astonishing ‘Devir’

We were blown away by Enrique Oliveira’s massive tree sculpture that seems to grow in all directions out of and through the walls, floor and ceiling of the gallery: ordinary materials turned into something palpably alive.

A Narrow Ledge Becomes a Picture Rail + Headboard

At Casa Helsinki, we spotted the ledge around the perimeter of a bedroom. It makes a natural display for pictures or other small objects and a terrific headboard. DIYable.

Silvery Woods from Low to High

We did a double-take during a virtual tour of a monochromatic home in Risskov, Denmark designed by haute-architecture firm Ardess: The luxurious silvery custom-made interior of Douglas fir, linoleum, and concrete looks curiously like the weathered silver-painted plywood door we spotted in Chelsea a couple of years ago, and fell in love with.

Re-envisioned Chairs We Could Make Ourselves

Over the past months, we’ve been collecting an illuminating array of chair images over at the great site Aqqindex. Each one has made us think, look into its structure, opened our mind to the many possibility of “chair”. All are so startlingly simple, it makes us think we could make them ourself:

Niemann’s Workspace: Plywood Picture Rails + Other Good Ideas

During a visit to Christoph Niemann’s website recently, we found ourselves smitten with the images of his workspace. They were full of decidedly straight-forward, practical ideas with a sort of deconstructed charm: back-to-back work tables on simple pipe frames, articulating task lights, flat files that serve as additional work surfaces. Niemann wrote us that the…

Brilliant Plywood: Stair Chair DIY

Now that it’s getting to be THAT time of year — the trees will soon be in bud, and warm weather upon us —we yen to hang out on stoops and stairs. We’re smitten with this StairChair that solves the problem of back support or needing a wide enough surface to lie down and snooze…

Clever, Strong Folding Sawhorses to DIY or Buy

(Video link HERE.) Barclay Moore is a woodworker who was fed up with broken sawhorses. So he designed is own and knocked prototypes out of plywood. Then he created a Kickstarter to raise money to sell his invention. The project, he says, developed out of necessity (as many great inventions do). What interests us most are all the constraints…

Material for Making: Healthy Plywood 101

Plywood is an endlessly useful, accessible, great-looking material for making, that has been inspired legions of artists, architects and designers. The glues used to make modern plywood often contains formaldehyde, so we’re passing on this great primer on healthy plywoods.

Stool, Reitveld Chair and Other Plywood DIYs, Via X-ray Vision

An essential practice of improvising is developing x-ray vision: you gradually train your eye, or mind to identify the essential structure of a thing, to understand how it works and how it is made. We learned about plywood construction by scrutinizing some cool simple furniture.

Tiny Plywood Studio Morphs into a Gallery via Pegs

We got a lot of ideas taking a little photo tour of the versatile 66-square-foot artist’s studio Anaan Stern and Shany Tal, with its many kinds of clever storage: folding bed, shelving, drawers of all sizes…But what we liked best are the wooden pegs inserted into sliding doors to hold works of art or open books, to make an ever-changeable private gallery.

Plywood Cube Room with Sliding Doors

We’ve known a number of people who have built small rooms within an existing space, but we have never seen one quite so appealing as this plywood cube. Bookshelves and storage along one side afford some sound proofing. And painted sliding doors make for an appealing wall in the main room.

Sheetrock or Plywood Walls With Shapes Cut Out

This installation by American artist Scott Carter is making us view walls as sculpture. Carter cuts out shapes from walls and formed them into furniture, like some living, human-sized puzzle. But we can’t stop mulling the idea of cutting out shapes from plywood, to give interest to walls or partitions.

harry roseman’s draped and folded plywood

Artist Harry Roseman’s makes draped and folded plywood sculptures. They turn art for its own sake, and shows us a whole other realm of possibility for this uniquitous material.

plywood veneers make cool walls + artful ceilings

Two images spotted on Japanese Trash recently opened our eyes to the possibility of using geometic cuts of plywood veneers as a wall covering. Ah, no, on closer inspection, the fireplace surround above appears to be stone…but it COULD be done with plywood… Why not? To get a sense of range of possibilities, we recommend

tree sculpture by enrique oliveira (what plywood can be)

Henrique Oliveira uses old plywood, fencing recycled from dumpsters and landfills from his home city, São Paulo, shaped around PVC forms. Henrique’s breakthrough occurred when he was a student at the University of São Paulo, where for two years the view from his studio window was a wooden construction fence. Over time Oliveira began to see…

plydesign: an essential guide to diy plywood projects

As we’ve mentioned, ‘the improvised life’s laboratory is something of an homage to plywood. We’ve used it for many things, from window sills to cabinets to floors. We love the stuff, and are constantly hatching plots in our head for furniture, housewares, endless inventions. So we are smitten with carpenter and author Philip Schmidt new book PlyDesign which…