Plywood: Origins To The Present Day

lucy Naylor
Elizabeth Lambourn
18th April 2015

Critical Contextual Studies Essay
Plywood, Its Evolution and Origins to the Present Day

Plywood, a modern building material invented in the twentieth century. Contrary to popular belief this is not so, Plywood dates back thousands of years and has its roots in ancient Egypt, China and ancient Rome. It had always been a hand made product until the nineteenth century when the industrial revolution and steam engines replaced traditional handmade artisanal methods. Further technological advances in the early twentieth century transformed plywood into the mass manufactured sheet material used today. Modern awareness of sustainability issues have made it necessary to explore material boundaries,
Mayo identified the potential for his Scale board and a developed items that could be produced from Scale board for example: inlaid chess boards to rocking chairs (Ngo, 2003, Page 18), but it would never have become anything without the technical advances that were born of the Industrial revolution, in fact it was the development in three areas in particular that led to the mass manufactured product of today. In 1890 the steam powered rotary cutter or veneer peeler (FIG 2) was invented, veneer had always been cut by hand using planes which limited the size of the veneer sheet (Klim, 1990, Page 3). Early in the nineteenth century mechanical saws evolved making craftsmen able to cut larger veneers but thick saw blades created a lot of waste. The veneer peeler was invented and did exactly that, using a steam powered rotary cutter, peeled huge continuous sheets of veneer from giant size logs of wood. At the same time the development of glues and adhesives were being explored, most glues at this time were still made from animal products, much like the ancient Egyptians who boiled animal bones to make glue. Two glues were developed during this time blood albumen glue and casein glue
Development of these machines have also made it a possible to be used in house by designers, architects, artists, craftsmen and hobbyist’s alike. While the amateur hobbyist might use a small CNC router at home for all kinds of model making, architects use the precision of both laser cutters and CNC’s to mock up small scale and life-size buildings, crafts people and artists have adopted plywood technology for their craft and really gone to town with it, the plywood sculpture shown in FIG 6 is laser cut from a very thin ply wood, if done by hand would be almost impossible to cut such exact patterns and incredibly time laborious as would the laser cut geometric shapes in Tine de Ruyssers mix of wood and textile sculptures (FIG 7). Artisans have also adopted plywood for ancient crafts such as wood turning, Sarah Thirwell mixes recycled plywood with other materials like recycled yoghurt pots and vending machine cups and turns them on a lathe to produce beautiful contemporary vessels (FIG 8), challenging conceptions of the traditional crafts, whilst exploring recycling and green materials. Another artist who works only with recycled plywood skate boards is Haroshi, a Japanese sculptor who uses old and broken boards cut down into tiny mosaic pieces to produce