Plywood is a manufactured sheet good consisting of wood plies laminated together. Each ply is a thin layer of wood cut by rotating the tree round about its center. It is a versatile wood product because of its strength, durability, affordability, dimensional stability, and resistance to bending and cracking.
These qualities come from plywood’s laminated construction and the alternating grain direction of each ply. The nature of the composition, though, brings with it an aesthetic concern in that the grains and plies can create a conflicting, disjointed presentation if they are not handled sensitively. Typically, this edge condition is hidden. On the other hand, this characteristic can be a distinctive opportunity to integrate the grain and ply into the design for a cohesive and consistent project. For example, consistent vertical grains, like the birch plywood used in the Meyr apartment paneling serve to elongate the space, making the ceiling feel taller than it is. This illustrates the effectiveness of unified wood grain across an apartment. What is interesting with plywood, though, is that it can maintain its effectiveness as a material even when qualitative differences become desired across a project. Essentially, one material of the same piece of plywood can be thought of to have up to four face appearances, making it a much more dynamic design medium than traditional lumber products.
With this in mind, examining a product such as the chess board becomes an interesting activity. Traditionally, chess sets are composed of white and black tiles with matching pieces. Obviously, this practice has countless exceptions, but fundamentally, the distinction between one set of pieces and the other set demands either a change in material or an additive finish or paint. This is where the characteristics of plywood become advantageous. By utilizing the composition of plywood, an entire chess set can be made from a single material by exploiting the contrast within the material. The tiles and pieces have qualitative differences in that the grain pieces and ply pieces remain visually distinct, but are fundamentally the exact same material.
Check out a video of the Baltic Birch Chess Set and its sliding compartments.
