The construction of this piece features vacuum formed plywood over curved torsion boxes, which are ribbed skeletons that make voluminous shapes light and stable. Hidden wood joinery allow this piece to be disassembled into it's component parts for ease of delivery. Materials include dyed solid and veneered figured walnut along with painted maple.
I've always been interested in the use of curved shapes and components that have volume in furniture. Some of the early proponents of the studio furniture movement used solid wood to create these sculptural forms that defined their work. The best known is probably Wendell Castle who, in his earlier work, used stacked lamination to create this new vocabulary in furniture. The process entails "brick-laying" together solid pieces of wood and then grinding and sanding them into their final form. It is a laborious process used to create work that bridges sculpture and furniture, and it does have some drawbacks. A few issues with this technique are that the furniture is often quite heavy, it uses a great deal of what can be an expensive raw material in it's production, it is not easy to produce in multiples, and it is structurally unstable due to the seasonal movement of the wood itself.
To get around this problem, I have explored the use of veneer and hollow core construction to make the shapes I use in my furniture. I can't produce the same type of organic carved furniture that Wendell Castle made famous, but I can make curved and rectangular parts that have volume and are light and stable. The process starts with making a torsion box, which is a gridded plywood skeleton that forms the core of the shape I’m producing. I then make bent plywood panels that conform to the shape of the torsion box and are glued to it and edged with thin strips of solid wood. This gives me an object that I can then use along with other shapes to make a piece of furniture. These pieces are light in weight and can be made with unique and often expensive wood veneers in a way that reduces the waste to almost nothing.