Yield Collection

DIY bent plywood furniture

About

Yield is a collection of comfortable plywood furniture designed to be built with common tools and materials. The idea to create these chairs came when I had been sitting in my Strap chair and realized the flat wood seat was quite uncomfortable for long periods. It reminded me of Enzo Mari’s famous Sedia 1 chair from his DIY furniture manual, Autoprogettazione. I wondered if anyone had created a DIY chair with a more comfortable curved seat. I searched around and quite a number of designers had created their own interpretation of DIY furniture, but none that I could find had curved wooden seats. Of course, I remembered, the masters of curved wooden furniture are Charles and Ray Eames. The Eameses used industrial bent plywood techniques to achieve beautiful and ergonomic forms. Bent plywood can be achieved a number of ways, but I thought that all of them were too complex to be considered “do it yourself”. The goal became to recreate bent plywood without the industrial equipment and complex techniques.

Open Source

Following in the footsteps of Enzo Mari, I’ve created a document that outlines the steps required to create the Yield collection. All that’s needed are simple handheld power tools. The collection uses standard lumber sizes and screws available at any hardware store. There are many other common sheet materials that could possibly be used. I would love to see a version with clear acrylic or even pegboard. The frames could be elevated with nice hardwood and brass screws, or simply finished with a stain, or maybe even painted a vibrant color. Whatever you end up with, please share and let me know how they turned out.

→ download the assembly instructions

Bending the Plywood

I began by testing how far store-bought plywood could bend without cracking. I realized that thin, 1/4” plywood could bend quite a bit if I screwed it down to a wood frame. After honing in the exact amount of bend, grain orientation, and soaking the wood, I was able to achieve a consistent 1 inch dip in the plywood. The curve was enough to improve the comfort significantly while still maintaining a strong, functional seat. As an added bonus, using plywood over solid boards made these chairs significantly lighter than other DIY furniture.

Refining the Design

Once I had proven out my make-shift bent plywood technique, I continued to design, build, and test the chair frames. I added bent plywood on the back rest and adjusted the dimensions of the frame to achieve optimal ergonomics. I designed the frames to look clean and flush so that the focus of the chair would be the curved plywood. There was a fine balance of making the frames easy to build but also look beautiful.