Plywood, a strong, low-cost board composed of glued-together, crisscrossed strips of waste wood, rose in popularity after World War II and became a building staple. Midcentury furniture designers Ray and Charles Eames began to experiment with this humble material, steaming and bending it the same way craftsmen did real wood, to make enduring, curvaceous furniture.
Fast-forward to 1995, when Dakota Jackson, a former magician and furniture designer in New York, was hired to design a library chair for the Main Library in San Francisco.
He inverted history and borrowed the look of bent-plywood furniture for a modern chair of solid wood. "It has simple, worked planes of wood that just look like bent wood," Jackson says.
Now he is experimenting with his own form of plywood. Among Jackson's latest designs at the De Sousa Hughes showroom in San Francisco, the Tango stackable chair and Cascade tables also have undulating planes, but these designs use the lamination principles of standard plywood.
"It is a simple technique but deceptively complex," Jackson says. Instead of carving wood to look like bentwood or bending flat plywood sheets in hand-carved molds, Jackson creates digitally designed molds carved from medium-density-boards using a computer-numerical-controlled machine. Crisscrossed layers of 1/16-inch-thick, 4-inch-wide American maple wood strips are put in the molds, steamed and glued together for 12 hours to form curved chair seats or table bases.
"It is just another way of making plywood," Jackson says. "You just don't have to bend it afterward."
At a glance
Expert opinion: Cascade tables have 31 layers of veneer woven together. Steaming and gluing them simultaneously requires care. "The amount of heat, water and glue used to mold them together is tricky. It can help or hinder elasticity if the material gets too soggy," Jackson says. "If it dries too quickly, the wood shrinks and cracks."
Pros: Jackson's lightweight Tango chair (pictured) and Cascade plywood tables use non-formaldehyde polyresin glues.
Cons: Although the material costs are low, Jackson's Tango and Cascade designs are labor intensive. Several prototypes have to be made for the right combination of curves and durability. "I like to push the material to create shapes without limit," Jackson said. "But the time it takes to make them perfect becomes costly." Hand-sanding, routing and doweling the wood forms either to metal bases or glass tops can add 12 hours to each piece. For instance, a team of people takes as much as a week to make one Cascade table.
Price: Tango chairs cost $576 each; Cascade coffee tables, depending on the high-gloss or matt azure, coal, ruby and chalk finishes, range from $6,569 to $7,399. Cascade dining tables cost $15,092 each; tempered glass tops cost extra.